EHS lost power last week on Tuesday Nov. 12 at around 9:20am. The halls went dark, and the banter began.
Rumors of the construction crew messing with something or was the rainy weather the cause of the sudden power outage.
Teachers and students across EHS report their lesson for the day being interrupted because they could not access their online resources. Neither faculty, nor student WI-FI was up and regularly functioning until the end of the school day.
According to an Ameren report, a vehicle crash caused a major power outage effecting nearly 8000 Edwardsville residents as well as the courthouse, where power wasn’t fully restored for two hours.
Following that Tuesday, only eight days later, another power outage occurred leaving EHS in the dark for about six minutes.
As the seasons change and weather is harsh, losing power isn’t a surprising occurrence, but with these outages not being attributed to the weather, its odd that it happened twice in about a week.
Complaints about the safety of the building has been frequenting the halls.
If the power has gone out, twice now, what’s next—losing heat, losing WI-FI?
Over the past couple of years district 7, as well as many other districts, and society overall, has put more and more reliance on the internet. Without WI-FI, we are left without immediate access to information and saved resources.
District 7 has been using Schoology for years and today teachers all over the district rely on it in order to get through a lesson.
Notes, assignments and tests are done through Schoology and last Tuesday gave us a taste of what classes would look like if we suddenly didn’t have those resources.
Were No. 2 pencils and college ruled notebooks really so bad? When did this convenient resource evolve to a reliance we can’t function without?
Because we can outsource power from other grids, we always have a backup, and there is little concern for losing power for a longer period.
There are all these precautions and backup plans because modern society struggles to function without WI-FI.
The natural evolution of the internet has granted an opportunity to endless knowledge in classrooms, offices, and anywhere on the go. As these tools advance, the users of them lose cognitive sense of how reliant they’ve become.