Almost every student, member of staff or visitor at PVHS has something to say about the troublesome WiFi experience every day. With constant outages, dead zones and increasingly spotty service, the WiFi at school has become a more pressing concern over the past few months.
Some have hypothesized that these problems come from the lack of quality in internet service, but that has since been disproven, and the culprit caught red-handed, or better yet, red-pawed.
A group of pesky rodents have been revealed as the cause of our problematic WiFi, chewing through cables in the span of a week.
According to teacher Tecia Barton, the rats are able to enter the classrooms in many different ways.
“We’ve always had mice running around [due to] the location of the school. As for the rats, they come from the roofs [because] the roofing throughout the campus is so dilapidated,” Barton said.
But the real bite is, the rats are causing more than just WiFi troubles. Classes are constantly being interrupted due to these rodents. Students have repeatedly complained about seeing critters sneaking around the classrooms, stealing food and other important supplies.
Barton says that the classrooms that are hit the hardest are those that have food or drink out in the open.
“It doesn’t help that I have a lot of food [in my class] but I keep the food in containers [and] refrigerators so they can’t get to the places where I put food.”
In order to keep the rats out, Barton shares her tactics.
“I clean my room every single day, [and] I vacuum it every single day. I’m doing everything in my power to control the rodents in my classroom.”
With so many classes being affected by these pests, the administrators have taken matters into their own hands.
“We are now working with American Pest Control,” Associate Principal Secretary Olivia Carrasquillo said.
“They come out every weekend and they change those big black boxes [around campus]. They empty them and put new [boxes]. They’ve brought over 50 black boxes to campus to help alleviate the problem.”
These boxes are slowly helping to reduce the damage that the rats are causing, but it will take time to replace the broken wires that have been chewed through.