Credit: Penelope Biddle

The picture above shows the computer that controls the bells at Wayland High School with the program that runs the bell schedules opened. A company is working to fix the bell schedule problem and aims to be done by sometime this week.

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.