While Princeton High School sophomores and juniors took the PSAT this month, they had a significantly better testing experience compared to last year. As an investment to improve the school’s testing infrastructure, PHS replaced over 350 access points and added an additional 50 access points in new locations. However, improvements to internet networks expanded beyond both PHS and testing-related infrastructure. The improvements were a district-wide endeavor, with the PPS technology team upgrading both wireless and physical infrastructure in all schools. The team replaced all access points and old cabling, bringing them to the newest standard.

“We replaced everything to be WiFi six ready, just [the] latest, greatest technology ... It’s for our general network for the entire district, which, again, will help testing,” said Danny Turner, district engineer.

Not only did the upgrade resolve short-term issues with testing, it was also an investment towards the ditrict future. As technology use becomes inceasingly prevalent within the district, networks need to be upgraded to support students that are constantly on their school devices.

“Now we have the newest standard for cabling. The old cabling was 20 years old. The new cabling is what’s being installed nowadays for everything. So even in X number of years that we do go to change this again, we won’t need to change all that cabling,” said Todd MacDonald, PPS’s chief technology officer.

The changes were prompted by issues during testing last year, where several students were unable to test in certain classrooms and others experienced frequent crashes of the testing infrastructure. Though the technology office acknowledged most problems were not on the school’s end, the improvements will ensure confidence in the network and in determining the source of any issue.

“The issue, from what I’ve heard, was actually more on the testing company’s end than our end,” said MacDonald. “We’re confident that ... there’ll be no issues in our network for this year.”

Overall, this investment positively impacted the students’ testing experience as students were able to focus on the actual test rather than ways to resolve the frequent technical issues. Improvements aim to guarantee a positive test experience for now while also ensuring long-term readiness for the future.

“I think part of it is trying to meet the needs that we have now, but also trying to make sure we have this in place that’s going to be able to support future needs as well. And this investment from the referendum is going to give us many years of network that we can handle the growth now,” said MacDonald.