Without further delay, the buildings within the Verona school district shall receive a long-anticipated update courtesy of a referendum voted upon by Verona residents on Tuesday, March 11^th.

Many aspects of these buildings that are to be addressed by this referendum, such as the heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems, have been on the verge of failure for a while. However, there is one very important part of the school system that has already proven to be cumbersome for students: the ten-year old computer network, particularly at Verona High School.

VHS students and staff alike, who commonly use the computers for class assignments, have reported countless issues with the school computers in the past. The most commonly occurring problems are frequent printer failures, incessant pop-ups, unresponsive keyboards and mice, issues with saving files, slow Internet connections and software, the inability for many students to log on to the server, and the many computers that do not even work at all. “[I] turned [a computer] on and it was dead. So was the next one,” said senior Louis Mattia of a recent experience in the VHS Library Media Center, which last school year had two working labs and now has just one. “I believe at some point the library was down to 15 computers that worked.”

VHS mathematics and computer science teacher Richard Wertz says that he has frequently discovered corrupt operating systems and application software. Mr. Wertz added that he has found the most frequent hardware issues to be unseated memory, a variety of network problems, and failures of the hard drives, power supplies, CPU fans and motherboards. According to teacher Pam Burke, the infrastructure is “barely held together.”

Apparently, these problems are frequent enough in the library and computer labs to disrupt the work environment. English teacher Alice Kobylarz summarized the consequences of the computer issues as “lost time, lost work and frustration.” Due to a combination of all of the aforementioned problems, large classes such as Journalism that use the computers frequently find themselves unable to complete work efficiently. Students will often end up spending significant minutes on tasks such as printing, which should only take a brief amount of time. Also, the school’s overloaded class-share database has proved to be problematic as it causes an inability for many students to save their work, resulting in many a lost assignment. Furthermore, the periodic failure of computers to connect to the Internet greatly hinders class-work and research.

MyVeronaNJ author Tracy Bermeo has stated in an editorial that, with education becoming modernized via the incorporation of new technology, the consequences of not addressing the computer issues will be great. “Our network foundation is on the verge of crashing,” Bermeo said, “and without the necessary upgrades our schools will stay in 2004.”

According to the information provided on the Verona school district’s official website, approximately $889 thousand out of the school referendum’s $17 million cost will go towards improving the school networks. The infrastructure will undergo maintenance with the installation of new switches, cabling, phone upgrades, and backup. District-wide wired and Wi-Fi networks as well as a back-up power generator will also be accounted for.  Some problems are likely to continue however as the money budgeted from the referendum will not cover the costs of additional computers, printers, labs, and software.

“Computers are machines. Machines are imperfect and will fail,” Mr. Wertz says. “We’ll never get 650 computers in the district to all work forever without failures… The way to make sure that those failures don’t affect the learning of our students is planning.” Before the referendum officially begins to take effect, Mr. Wertz has listed a number of things that can be done in the meantime. He suggests that the school can purchase new computers with warranties and proposes that the school develop a plan in which 20% of the district’s computers are replaced each year. Mr. Wertz and Mrs. Burke also suggest that the school purchase “hot spares” to be plugged in and used in the event that a computer fails. “If every lab had two spares in the room,” Mrs. Burke said, “it would enable the staff to fix an issue and then have the technology staff fix the problem offline.”