April showers bring May flowers—and, apparently, computer storage issues. This has become clear in a Grandview-wide problem: school computers are hitting their GB limits, creating serious obstacles for students trying to complete online work.

“I’ll be honest, I was really taken aback by the fact that they limited [computer storage] to 5 and 10 gigabytes at the very beginning without telling anybody,” James Dykstra (CTE Design and Multimedia Arts) said. “That made it really, really difficult for the students. We had students that were coming back from a field trip that couldn’t upload their pictures. 
It kind of halted the whole curriculum.”

Large picture uploads are crucial to not just Dykstra’s classes. Student-led media classes such as GVTV, The Grandview Chronicle, and other photo/video content heavy classes rely on adequate drive storage. Additionally, students taking content heavy classes with large documents and

 files have had to find ways to work around the limitation. 

“It [has] prevented some of my work, like in Human Geography. We have to copy our documents, so it can get pretty [difficult],” Bebui Alamayo (9) said. 

However, the district was quick to act in fixing the issue. 100GB were added to computers experiencing the drive storage warnings.

“I think that for level one classes- for most of them- that’s sufficient. I don’t know if that’s gonna work for classes like video broadcasting, where they’re working with really, really big files. 
I think that that is a good start though,” Dykstra said. 

Dykstra believes that there is potential to pair it with an additional solution. 

“A shared drive that could accommodate people who were editors or who were in positions where they needed that additional storage could work out,” Dykstra said. 

For the time being, students appreciate the additional space. 

“It’s actually sufficient because it helps me with all my storage, especially because I film a lot of videos,” Alamayo said. 

Though the additional storage is a sufficient enough solution for most students, some who are still struggling with the storage issue because they have different requirements than other students, will be glad to hear that the district is having a meeting to discuss alternative solutions.

“I just think that they need to understand that different classes have different requirements and requirements for storage, and that they need to have ways to accommodate, not only students, but programs,” Dykstra said.