The struggle of finding enough bars to get your message to go through. Pointlessly waving your phone around in the air. From not being able to communicate on rides home, to not delivered signs popping up during a lockdown, the lousy cell phone reception at Shorewood High School is a safety hazard that must be fixed.
For some people bad reception at Shorewood is nothing but a small nuisance that can be fixed by a short walk outside during break. For others, it leaves them stranded outside of school after hours because they weren’t able to coordinate a ride home. “Sometimes it ends up with me staying at school for hours because I can’t get a ride home,” freshman Olive Tolbert says. The bad reception kept her from communicating a ride home from Shorewood, something that has happened to countless others and will most likely continue to happen.
While some people will say that the reception has gotten better over the years, there are still many parts of the school that have no cell service at all. While the newer iPhones may get better coverage, most students can’t or don’t want to get the newest iPhone, leaving most of the Shorewood population without cell service.
Although this is a very big problem, it’s not something that is easily fixed. “The building doesn’t have any booster or repeater systems installed because it’s very, very expensive,” said Bill Dunbar, principal. At odds with popular belief, the school does not have any cell blockers installed, while most students believe there are. The reason the reception is so terrible is because the school is made of steel. Dunbar refers to it being like, “a cube, within a cube, within a cube.”
In Shorewood, there are cell boosters in the big areas, such as the commons, that help to boost 911 calls. But is that enough? During an emergency, kids not only need to get in touch with 911 but also their parents. While Shorewood administrators believe that having good cell service is not a priority since the students shouldn’t be on their phones anyways, the students are freaking out during a school emergency. The students can’t get in touch with their parents due to the reception and tell them what is happening.
When it comes down to whether or not the school should have better reception, the answer is always yes, it should. The school needs to have better reception so the students can contact and be contacted in case of an emergency. Whether it’s a personal or a general problem, it’s important for the students to be able to communicate with people outside of the school about it. But, is it something that can be easily fixed? No, because cell boosters cost around $100,000 to buy, the school is unable and very unlikely to buy them, leaving students with the only thing we can do: get as close to the outside as possible and hope that it gives us at least one or two bars.
