By Prabhvir Lakhan | Reporter

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On Aug. 4, administrators collected all the school laptops to fix a problem with the switchover of Lightspeed filters to the Iboss security filters. Afterward, while the amount of students heading to the media center with tech issues has decreased, some students continue to have issues with their laptops.

In a survey of 100 students conducted the week of Aug. 7-11, 33 percent of respondents said they have “a lot” of problems with their HP Streams, 47 percent reported “some” problems and 20 percent have “few or no” problems. Nearly all respondents, however, said having laptops has been beneficial to their learning.

Sophomore Kaitlyn Sinclair received her computer in eighth grade; she said her computer crashes a lot and loses battery quickly.

“We’ve been doing activities in class, and I haven’t been able to do them because my computer isn’t working,” Sinclair said.

After the reimaging Sinclair’s computer had internet connectivity problems at home.

“I don’t really see why we use the computers when they crash a lot,” she said.

Sophomore Matthew Barton has had slow internet connection at home as well after the reimaging.

“I’ve been able to get my homework done on the laptop, but it takes longer. I usually have to use my desktop to finish it. All students don’t have other computers to work on though,” Barton said. “My academic performance has gone down because there have been a few times where I was unable to do my homework because the internet has not worked.”

Mr. Jacob Epperson, the head technician at Avon High School, said that the switchover of filters was a challenge, but it was successful in alleviating many of the laptop issues students were facing.

“Before the reimaging, we had about 20 visits per period, now we have about three to four visits per period,” said Mr. Epperson.

Epperson said that while most of the problems seem to be solved, there is still some concern over slow connectivity for students at home.

“We just started hearing about [wireless connectivity problems at home] a few hours ago. There are a lot of things that can cause it. It could be one of the generations, the filter system, there are a lot of potential causes so we have to hammer down where it is before we fix it,” Epperson said.

Mr. Frank Meyer, the assistant principal and the technology director of Avon High School, said that the HP Streams are a good computer for school activities—he said some students expect the performance of a high-end computer, which they are not going to get.

“I don’t believe the district would or should replace the laptops. It is a significant upfront investment that likely would not have a great enough return on investment. I believe that the future of 1:1 computing at AHS may become the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) model,” Meyer said.