On January 23rd, 1996, WiFi was invented; on February 24th, 2025, Skyline took a trip down memory lane back to the olden days when it never existed. The WiFi in all of Ann Arbor Public Schools (AAPS) went down during second hour, stalling classes and hindering students for nearly two hours.
“Right now, it really stinks, because I have some work for an important online class that I have to do,” said Kaiwen Smith (‘25), “but without the WiFi, I can’t access my textbook or the assignments that I’m supposed to be doing.”
Virtually every class in the district requires the use of the internet. WiFi going down — even for 10 to 15 minutes — can halt schooling.
“There are certain classes like computer science, there’s not an alternative [of the internet for] that class,” says Lindsey Szurek. The computer science teacher “was like, ‘oh, maybe I’ll print something and they can work on coding [on] paper,’ and I said, ‘you’re not going to print anything because you need the internet [to print].’”
Teachers who were able to hotspot from their phone did so. Students in the library to do online classes were not able to do their coursework without WiFi as 4th hour went by. Students on deadline in journalism were unable to edit their work, and forced to have face to face conversations and play card games.
“[I’m] somewhat distraught, but also it’s an excuse to not do work,” said Kirill Zamulin (‘25). “I might play some block blast later.”
The student’s inability to do anything but wait made many angry, as this meant they could be critically backlogged as they come up on end of trimester deadlines.
“I mean, Ann Arbor!” said Violet Olley (‘28). “You think they’d have enough money to be able to fix it, but I guess not.”
Each student had their own way of dealing with the lack of WiFi, ranging from ignoring work to connecting their computers to their phones’ hotspots.
“So you know how in … the times of the Great Depression,” said Zamulin, “people had to power through it, just on willpower and the knowledge that they would eventually win World War Two…. So basically, you just live with the knowledge that you know one day it all is gonna become better.”
