Weak signals and dead spots in the Lawrence school district’s Wi-Fi service will hopefully be problems of the past when students return to school next month.

The district has completed improvements to its Wi-Fi network, which include adding more Wi-Fi access points to every school and reconfiguring certain signal settings. Those changes are especially important as the district is set to distribute thousands of new tablet and laptop computers next school year.

“We’re going to have a more robust system,” said Jennifer Fessenden, the district’s department of technology services supervisor. “We’re not going to see as much interference; it will be more reliable.”

About 50 new Wi-Fi access points have been installed districtwide, with each school gaining two or three additional access points. Previously, some complained that slow or spotty signals amounted to wasted class time.

Fessenden said the improvements concentrated on making sure the Wi-Fi signal is reliable in classrooms and learning pockets, which are study areas where teachers and students can work in small groups. Especially with older schools that are mostly brick, Fessenden said some dead spots in hallways may persist, but classroom signals will be more concentrated.

“We did some tweaking on the actual settings of each wireless access point, to make the bubbles a little tighter instead of more broad,” Fessenden said.

Next school year, the district will issue 5,000 iPads and bring 125 more technology-based blended learning classrooms online. The blended learning teaching model relies on online apps and activities, and the new additions will bring the total number of such classrooms districtwide to more than 400. Fessenden said the demands those additional devices will place on the district’s Wi-Fi were taken into account.

“They had in mind we were primarily Apple products, and the numbers of devices that will actually be in the schools,” Fessenden said.

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 wireless site survey to evaluate the system. Fessenden said the need for the survey was a combination of several factors, such as an underestimation of how many Wi-Fi access points would be necessary, as well as increased demand from additional devices and recent school expansions.

“We needed just another set of eyes and another layer of expertise in addition to all of the construction and the changes in the buildings,” Fessenden said.

The Wi-Fi services and consulting firm Wireless Training & Solutions spent three months evaluating all of the district’s 22 facilities. For each facility, WTS created a report detailing the network issues and recommendations to improve service. The cost of the survey and equipment purchases totaled about $154,000.

Fessenden noted that future technology expansions were also considered, such as a potential 1-to-1 device ratio at the high school level. A group of high school students will spend the first semester of the upcoming school year piloting Apple iPads and MacBooks, and the school board is scheduled to decide on particulars of the rollout in the spring.

“If we were to go to 1-to-1 or something like that down the road, it will already be set up for that,” she said.