Since Feb. 20, Francis Howell School District has been experiencing a network outage. As a result of these issues, the school was forced to have students learn through AMI (Alternate Methods of Instruction) days. But how did this network issue affect FHC’s clubs and athletic programs? 

The AMI days threw everyone through a loop, especially those in clubs in sports.  Spring sports had issues arise with impact testing causing a delay in some tests and they had trouble due to the fact that records of players were now extremely difficult to view.  Clubs were forced to meet over zoom and have practices at home. The Esports team were lucky enough to have their practices smoothly and successfully. Sophomore Declan Fowler, captain of the “Valorant” team explained what the team did for practice.

“For practice we conducted at home, luckily practice wasn’t that different as we are typically on computers but it did make giving criticism more difficult,” Fowler said

Sophomore Adeline Law who is on the speech and debate team explains how her club was affected.  There was extra pressure as they had a tournament coming up.  This competition won’t be directly affected as it is held outside of school however it made practicing for it so much more complicated than it should have been. As the team had to find a work around for not being in school and not having WiFi.

“Over the AMI days we had a Zoom meeting in place of our practice. We didn’t get to actually practice, instead we got everything squared away for our tournament this weekend,” Law said.

These AMI days changed the way these clubs had to meet and practice, but unfortunately it wasn’t over once we got back to school as the wifi was still out.  So these clubs had to adapt again.  The Esports teams rely on WiFi to play their matches so they needed to change how they did things completely.

“Since everyone had the capability to play at home we just played a game at home, however, some of our setups aren’t as good as they are at school, so that made things a little more difficult,” Fowler said. 

This problem with the WiFi created a problem deeper than just not being able to play at school for the esports team.  It forced changes and unfortunately for some, these changes were not welcome as home setups and WiFi may not be as good as the ones in the school.  Speech and debate also had issues come from the problems with the WiFi. They need the internet to research before speeches and they use computers for their scripts. It also makes entries for tournaments much more difficult.

“We can’t finalize entries until we get home. We can’t send emails to check to make sure people can go to events, it just makes things way more complicated and difficult,” Law said. 

Not having internet access at schools has made the lives of club members a lot harder, but it’s not just them.  With spring sports right around the corner it has caused many complications.  Activities Director Scott Harris explained these complications and what they did to work around these issues.

“We had to reschedule two of our Impact tests due to the AMI days luckily the majority of our kids had their tests done prior,” Harris said

The Impact testing of the students wasn’t affected all that much, thankfully many have already had this screening as it’s only required every two years. But this test wasn’t the only thing affected due to Infinite Campus being down; it made things way more difficult as student reports were not easily transferred to coaches.

“Instead of having these reports on Campus and being able to send them to the coaches we have to look through and let the coaches know if the student is eligible to play.  We don’t want to make the coaches come down here and look through a 150-page packet to figure out if a student is eligible, instead we figure it out for them.” Harris said.

This whole debacle has created numerous problems for the start of spring sports, but they are trying to stay prepared in case something like this happens again.

“We are always looking for better options trying to streamline the process but this has caused us to pause and take a look at the situation and find what we can do better for kids, parents, coaches, and the office,” Harris said.