Over Imagine Prep timeline, we’ve had some major projects that we worked on in order to make this school more suiting for the increasing number of students it has been taking in year from year. Only the upperclassmen remember when Imagine had two giant rooms full of just computers called “Core lab 1 & 2”, now it makes up six classrooms and a private office. We’ve updated our school so much over the years I’d even argue we got twice the classrooms then we had in 2012, so with all of the updates made to the physical school, maybe we should consider updating our technology. Imagine needs to face the fact that their students are working on decade old desktops and monitors, cheap, flimsy Chromebooks and internet that goes out in several classrooms. No one can deny that we need a tech update, we have too many students and classrooms but hardly enough computers that are working to compensate for it. We might be a bit overdue for a tech update.

It’s vital that students can have the accessibility to work on a device to get their work on Google Drive, their emails or whatever need be, but we have 700+ students and not enough technology to go around for them when we have to move middle and high schoolers around to do Star Testing, a lot of teachers have to move classrooms because their rooms are being taken for the computers in them, it scrambles the seniors around as we try to find where our teacher(s) was moved to for the hour. We don’t have enough computers, but what’s even worse is that some of the computers we do have are broken, whether it be that they can’t turn on or they take too long to load something that it isn’t worth the hassle of using them — there’s just no point in having them around. After looking at several classrooms to find out how many computers were working properly or at all, if we did a room to room sweep to get rid of all the unusable computers that are sitting around and gathering dust, we’d rid the school for roughly 18 percent of the computers sitting around the school. Our Chromebooks have been very good for the school for a pretty long time, however, they’re starting to break. The laptops are losing keys, running slower and out right breaking due to accidents. Our electronics are running out of time and the school should try to put aside some funds to fix this issue, most of our technology wont last longer than 2020 anyways.

Imagine Preps computers are the only thing that is having issues, the school’s WiFi is terrible as well. Some classrooms have such a hard time connecting to the schools internet that they spend more time trying to connect to it than actually being usable. The wifi isn’t strong enough to run all the student’s electronics as the school computers WiFi just doesn’t work well enough. Imagine needs better internet for their computers and students.

How do we do fix this issue? Well, we can start by gathering all of our computers that we know still work and sell it or give it to charity. Then the school can start doing a fundraiser for all the students so we can buy new Chromebooks. Once we do this we can try going for dress down days and pizza dinners or pancake breakfasts to get more funds. After we upgrade our new technology we can move onto fixing the school WiFi, maybe try to get a better plan or install a satellite dish to the school. We don’t need these changes now, but we need to make a plan if we want to better our schools.