![The Wayland Police Department have issued a warning on the rise of scammers during the holiday season. “Hang up [the phone]. if you get a text and you do not know who it's from, just delete it. Don't click on any links, nothing,” Wayland police chief Edward Burman said. “Every single one of them is a scam.”](https://waylandstudentpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/img_0954_720-e1734676255647.jpg)
![WHS’s Connect Program ran its annual holiday gift drive to fulfill the wishlist of children enrolled in the Dorchester based non-profit daycare organization, the Yawkey Center. This drive brought the town together and impacted both the students in Connect, as well as the greater Wayland community. “You could see how helpful the town was and how our community came together and wanted to help out a community that wasn't our own [and] kids who were less fortunate than we were,” senior and Connect Program member Jordynn Lee said.](https://waylandstudentpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/screenshot_2024-12-20_at_12.21.24___pm_720-e1734734228474.png)
![The Boy Scouts will be selling trees on Fridays from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., Saturdays 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sundays noon to 6 p.m. until they sell out.
“This event is one of the things that [the Boy Scouts] get to have a direct impact on the community,” freshman Alex Macleod said.](https://waylandstudentpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Screenshot-2024-12-11-at-8.38.38 AM.png)
Since Thursday, Dec. 21 the Wayland High School bells have been ringing on an extended advisory bell schedule. At WHS, the ringing of bells signifies the start and end of each class period, so this incorrect bell schedule has caused some teachers and students confusion, frustration and disruptions to class.
A few days prior to the bells being set for the extended advisory schedule, Wayland experienced heavy rain and winds. Consequently, WHS lost power, causing the cancellation of school on Tuesday, Dec. 19. It is likely this power outage is what caused the bells to become stuck. However, WHS Assistant Principal Laura Cole said she and her colleagues have not confirmed that this is the reason.
WHS administration has brought in an outside company to sort out the details of the bell system that are too specialized for WHS staff to understand. The company has made some progress in fixing the bells.
“Our bells and our P.A. system are on a software program, so everything is controlled in this cloud,” Cole said. “There is a malfunction in the cloud, which is what has caused these computer technology people to have to come in and reconfigure and reinstall software that’s old. They have to upgrade it and re-put [the bell schedule] on and it’s glitching and not connecting in our system.”
Because it’s a software issue, the problem goes beyond the more frequent human error or easy-to-fix tech issues that most often allow the bells to return to normal by the following day. The necessary extense of this repair process is why the bells have, for the past few days, occasionally been ringing at the correct times, but also why students may hear unusual sounds over the loudspeaker such as random beeps or buzzes.
“We are being told, though I don’t know, that by the beginning of [the week of Jan. 27], [the bells] should be fixed,” Cole said.
