Sitka’s internet outage is inconvenient for residents, and affecting commerce in some businesses that were not able to make the jump to Starlink.
Students, however, are really going old school – literally. While Sitka’s school buildings have connectivity, there’s not the bandwidth needed to run classes as usual. As student school board member Francis Myers put it, he and his classmates are having to resort to historical methods.
“The internet outage has affected Sitka High pretty severely for the first few days,” Myers said. “It’s gotten a bit better. We got Starlink in the offices, and so the faculty is able to print paper, and so a lot of the students are now doing pencil and paper for a lot of their assignments.”
Myers was sworn into his seat at the start of the Sitka School Board’s regular meeting on Wednesday (9-4-24). He replaces his older brother Felix who graduated last spring. Felix Myers was a significant voice on the school board, and Francis appears likely to carry on that tradition, if only the broken undersea fiber optic cable had not taken down Sitka’s internet a week earlier.
“Because of the WiFi outage, I didn’t really get the papers for this meeting,” he said, “but that’ll happen later.”
The lack of connectivity affected others at the meeting. Superintendent Deidre (dee-uh-dree) Jenson had to deliver a report or two from memory. She expressed appreciation for classroom teachers who were “taking it in stride” despite the internet outage, and noted that students were rediscovering in-person communication.
“I think there are some positives to maybe not having internet all the time,” Jenson said. “I was in the high school on the steps on Friday morning, and I was hearing the hum among the kids, and I was like, ‘Is this a little bit of a more of a conversation buzz than we normally have?’ And someone said, ‘Yeah, I think it is.’”
GCI’s undersea fiber optic cable which serves Sitka failed on Thursday, August 29. A cable-laying ship is underway from Victoria, B.C., to make repairs, which are expected to be completed sometime after September 9.
