Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor of the Jabberwock,

It has recently come to my attention that the MLWGS email accounts assigned to us by the administration will no longer be able to receive email from any private accounts. I’d like to take advantage of the school paper to express my dismay, confusion, and disagreement with this recent decision by our esteemed technology administrators.

I personally, as well as many of my friends and peers at Maggie Walker, email most of my assignments to myself from home, so that I can print them out at school in the morning. This strategy works well for me; I don’t accidentally leave my homework on the bus, I don’t have to spend money on my own printer’s ink cartridges, and I get my work in on time.

The school website says that we should use our school accounts on both ends of situations like this, which would nullify the problem completely if the school email application worked on my computer. I have rarely been able to access my school email account at home (for whatever reason), even following the directions presented on the website. The few times I do accomplish this feat, the application is insufferably slow in sending or opening emails that don’t include attachments (for whatever reason). I can only imagine my frustration were I trying to email a ten page Microsoft Word document to myself. I’m sure there are others who can relate.

As convenient as the school account may be for certain tasks, it’s simply not as efficient, easy to use, or high quality as Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, or any of the other email clients most students employ. The school network is (for whatever reason) notoriously unstable, and prone to become completely inaccessible to all students for hours, or even days, at a time. Last year alone, I can remember at least two separate incidents that directly affected me.

I could list a number of other situations in which not being able to receive mail from non-MLWGS email addresses could be a major hindrance (contacting college admission offices, contacting sources for science projects, etc.), but I know that all Maggie Walker students understand this issue just as well as I.

All of this leads me to several questions. Is there a lack of trust involved, here? Are we being punished? Does the administration suspect us of abusing our technological privileges? Is this a way of weeding out the clutter plaguing the Maggie Walker network? More importantly, what can we, as students, do to work with the administration to fix this problem?

Jimmie Lee Jarvis

Class of 2010