Students find disorganization this year with no planners

Erin Hanratty, Sports Editor
October 5, 2009
Filed under Opinion

On the first day of school when I walked into homeroom, I was caught by surprise to find that there was no planner sitting on my desk.

The administration had decided to stop providing its students with an important tool for organization in order to advocate a new policy – JC had gone paperless. 

Theoretically, the paperless policy could be a good idea.

 In reality, going paperless is undoubtedly an inconvenient, unreliable hassle being thrown at the students. 

I started to realize that the new paperless policy had more disadvantages than not just receiving a planner.

 The use of student laptops is pushed even more than before.  Technology is supposed to make our lives more convenient.  It is supposed to save us time, energy, and stress; however, the laptops that students are expected to use have a tendency of making life anything but convenient. 

Between broken styluses, dead batteries, cracked screens, malfunctioning key boards, unreliable internet connection, and crashed hard drives, the student laptops have seen every imaginable technological malfunction. 

A majority of the time, the technology problems that students face are completely out of their control and in no way their fault.  Working with such unreliable technology makes school work even more difficult than it already is.  When the laptops are broken beyond any use, how are students supposed to function in a technological paperless world? 

As more and more broken computers pile up in the tech lab, countless students are left computer-less due to the lack of supply of loner computers.  The tech lab says their goal is to have broken laptops repaired within twenty-four hours; however with the flood of technical problems this is rarely the case.

Ever since Gateway went under last year, the tech lab has a difficult time obtaining new parts to repair the juniors’ and seniors’ laptops.   It can take months for the tech lab to finally find spare parts and to finally repair the computers and return them to their owners.  Also, the prices of spare computer parts have skyrocketed since Gateway went under.  A part that would have originally cost $40 jumped to $80 and later to $120, which JC would need to pay in order to repair the laptop.  And sometimes, the problem with the laptop cannot be fixed at all.    

For example, my hard drive randomly crashed at least four times JC, which the tech lab was unable to do anything about.  Therefore, all of the files on my laptop were permanently lost. 

How are students supposed to gain the benefits of technology if the technology is not reliable?  Why should our school be paperless if it is going to make our already hectic lives even more stressful?

Erin Hanratty can be reached at ehanratty@jcpatriot.com.