Improvements to the Lawrence school district’s troubled Wi-Fi network will be made before 5,000 iPads are handed out to students and teachers next school year. The district’s network has been plagued by slow and unreliable service, but district administrators said improvements are on the way.

In addition to more devices, the district’s Wi-Fi networks will have to contend with about 350 technology-reliant blended learning classrooms and 10,000 students who use at least one digital textbook. In order to provide better Wi-Fi service, the district plans to create tighter “bubbles” of stronger, more reliable Wi-Fi signals in classrooms, learning pockets, libraries and larger common areas, said Jennifer Fessenden, supervisor of the department of technology services. Fessenden said those changes will help eliminate interference.

“The wireless access points were basically fighting with each other is what happened,” Fessenden explained. “And so we’re dialing it down to tighter areas.”

Problems with the district’s Wi-Fi have been prevalent since the district purchased a more than $1 million Wi-Fi system in 2014. In January, the Lawrence school board approved a $79,000 wireless site survey to evaluate the system. Over the past three months, the Wi-Fi services and consulting firm Wireless Training & Solutions evaluated all of the district’s 22 facilities. WTS created a report for each facility that details network issues and recommendations to improve service, Fessenden said.

The main culprit was internal and external interference. Fessenden said internal interference resulted from the various Wi-Fi access points within a school. The external interference was caused by the Wi-Fi of nearby homes, businesses and hotspots brought into schools by staff and students.

“All of these things contribute, and any one of them may not be a huge deal, but since we have so many of them, they’re all just exacerbating the problem,” Fessenden said.

To reduce internal interference, Fessenden said the district’s wireless technician can make adjustments to the frequency, channel and power of each Wi-Fi access point so that access points throughout a school aren’t interfering with each other. External interference can be reduced by looking at the channels and frequencies of outside signals and tailoring a school’s Wi-Fi to avoid them, she explained.

Another recommendation is adding more Wi-Fi access points to schools, but Fessenden said only a few access points will be added per school. She did not have an estimate of how much the hardware for more Wi-Fi access points could cost, but said the funds would come from the district’s capital outlay budget.

“The actual adding (of Wi-Fi access points) isn’t going to be a huge cost or concern; it’s actually pretty minimal,” Fessenden said. “…It’s really about managing each individual wireless access point based on the information we’ve gathered.”

Part of that management is having personnel who are trained to troubleshoot problems with the network. The district has 10 building technicians and one wireless technician who Fessenden said was part of the district’s IT department previously. The wireless technician was able to shadow the lead engineer of WTS as well as receive additional training, she said.

“He knew a lot of that prior, but it just gave him another level of understanding,” Fessenden said.

Changes to Wi-Fi networks have already begun, beginning this week with Cordley Elementary. Fessenden said the goal is to make changes to as many schools as possible before summer break in order to test their effectiveness with students in the buildings. Because half the new iPads will go to the district’s middle schools, those will be the next networks to be worked on, she said.

“It’s important for us to make sure that we get through the middle schools at least before school is out so we can get a really good idea that these adjustments will give us the results that we want,” she said.