Clayton’s ongoing challenges with poor WiFi connectivity and unreliable cell service are not isolated incidents, nor are they unique to our district alone. Across the region, including in neighboring districts like Ladue, schools are facing similar technological hurdles. These widespread issues highlight a broader, systemic problem affecting educational environments and student access to digital resources.
“I have a hard time getting on my device at times, and simple things such as Gmail sometimes don’t work,” Ladue junior Sam Manlin said. “I would say that I’ve noticed a decline in the WiFi over the past few years. It hasn’t always been bad, but it’s progressively gotten worse.”
Manlin and Meyers both assert that the slow connection speeds create unnecessary barriers in their learning processes, often preventing them from completing timely assignments.
“My learning is affected by the poor connectivity because there will be assignments on Google Classroom that are posted but just aren’t reachable,” Manlin said.

Attempts to compare the WiFi systems at Ladue and Clayton hit a roadblock due to a lack of response from the Director of Technology, despite several attempts to reach out.
On the other hand, students and staff in private schools explained that they very rarely have any connectivity issues, whether they are using their phones or school-issued computers.
“We haven’t had network issues in a while,” John Burroughs Director of Technology, Martha McMahon said. “Sometimes there has been a little bit of a dead spot, and I introduce a new radio. That’s happened a couple of times in the last five years.”
McMahon has learned more about the connection in their buildings from specialists the district has brought in.
“We’ve had an outside survey team go through and take pictures,” McMahon said. “They ask you where the areas [are] where you’re expecting the most connections to be taking place, and then they make a heat map and overlay that with the plans of the building. They tell you you get the best coverage if you put it in these places. I’ve seen that done by an outside company enough times, and now I can look at plans and tell where to put them.”
Although school technologists cannot control cell service, McMahon has found that boosting the WiFi signal can improve cellular connections.
“Most phones have the ability to send texts or make calls either with a cell signal or WiFi or a combination of the two,” she said. “We have notoriously weak cellular signals on campus, since we are in Ladue; however, we have found that boosting the WiFi around campus has helped a great deal. For example, we had a handful of teachers in the lower level of the main building [who] were especially having difficulty, but once we put an access point in every classroom down there, they were able to use the WiFi to use their cell phones to make or receive calls and texts.”
McMahon highlights the fact that their speedy WiFi is also safe and secure. If students are worried about being on their school’s WiFi, there are methods of increasing privacy.
“Regarding the privacy of using WiFi for texts and calling, there is a setting with your IP address on the WiFi where you can limit tracking by making your IP address private,” McMahon said. “This is what most folks do with our WiFi. Also, on campus, all devices are protected by our firewall, so it’s fairly safe since nobody from the outside can gain unauthorized access to anything on our internal network anyway.”
Although connectivity seems to be working near perfectly at Burroughs, McMahon still recognizes that acquiring and maintaining an efficient internet and WiFi system is not easy.
“It’s not an easy problem to fix, but if people are complaining and are not happy in their learning environment, and if you want effective instruction to be taking place in your building, you don’t want internet issues contributing to the environment being negative,” McMahon said.

MICDS shares many similarities with Burroughs, and their connection speeds are reportedly just as efficient. They also outsource their network professionals, using an outside company called Essential Network Technologies.
“They are our networking professionals, so we don’t have an internal network administrator,” MICDS Director of Technology Stuart Crais said. “We contract that out because it’s hard to find good people [who] will stay for a while as a network administrator, and also, you’ll see that these companies, because they work at multiple different locations, bring in a little bit more diverse kind[s] of ideas. They have a more global view of networks and typically train their folks well.”
Crais notes the common confusion between WiFi and cell service and explains their difficulties when providing sufficient cellular connection speeds.
“We survey about twice a year just to get a good perception on how things are going,” Crais said. “It’s usually in the high 90% satisfaction range, but sometimes people confuse WiFi with cell phone connectivity. We have pretty bad cell service out here. What a lot of people do is just move onto the WiFi and use that to browse the internet, so whenever they’re on the WiFi, it works fine, but if they just run their cell signal, not so much.”
Crais strongly relies on feedback from MICDS staff and students on their connectivity performance. He emphasizes the importance of communication.
“We need to make sure that we are talking to teachers and students and listening to people that are having problems,” Crais said. “We need to make sure that we are asking questions and not saying, ‘Well, it should work’ and then not helping. We want it to work as much as they do. We want that connectivity so they can do their jobs as students or teachers. Make sure you understand who you are and why you’re here. We’re at the school to provide education to the kids. That’s our main role. So we really work to provide good customer service to our students and teachers.”
Crais also found that adding more access points to weak areas of buildings during network congestion improves WiFi and cellular connectivity. He notes that private schools could possibly have greater connection speeds than public schools due to outside pressures.
“It may just be the expectations that the private schools have, like, ‘Hey, this has to work, and you have paying customers,’” Crais said. “It’s hard to pinpoint that because I don’t have as much experience with the public schools as I do with the private schools.”
Clayton, Burroughs, and MICDS all use MOREnet, a Missouri-operated department that provides secure network infrastructure for educational institutions across the state. However, some other factors clearly elevate both Burroughs and MICDS’ networks much higher than our own.
Meyers connects the recent issues with cell service to the newly implemented phone policy, arguing that Clayton’s focus needs to be shifted to the larger issue.
“I think the phone policy has become completely irrelevant when you think about texting a parent in a time of crisis,” Meyers said. “My concern right now isn’t that I won’t be able to access my phone because it’s in a calculator pocket. My concern is that I won’t be able to access my phone when it’s in my hand because the WiFi isn’t working. The biggest issue is that I can’t text my parents. I can’t text speech in debate group chats. I can’t text my sibling to figure out car situations. My mom, my twin and I share a car, and I can’t text, email, or communicate, period. People are ignorant to be worried about the phone policy right now, when the WiFi itself is the bigger problem.”

AP Environmental Science Teacher Ava Hughes highlights the complexity of the issue, calling attention to technology’s unpredictability.
“This issue is not as simple as it seems,” Hughes said. “Some things are outside our control, like the one time that only half the building lost power. Well, if you don’t have power, you also don’t have WiFi, right? It’s one of those things where there are so many factors involved that it’s hard to tell what the actual solution is. It could just be that it was stormy outside and impacted something else, which impacted something else. So it’s a huge web of connectivity that causes these issues.”
Although Cearley agrees with that sentiment and understands that finding a solution is difficult, she argues that the issue requires attention and needs to be solved soon.
“I cannot even imagine the complications of establishing internet connectivity for a building of this size, for a district of this size,” she said. “However, if we are the school district of Clayton with the reputation, pride and preparation that we place with our name, then we gotta do better. We need to think about our long-term plan as a district. I don’t know how the funding works. I don’t know how the infrastructure works, but I just know that if you genuinely want to be a 21st-century school, it’s got to be better than this. You’ve got to evolve with the times.”
Gutchewsky assures that the problem is being addressed and that an effort is constantly being made to improve for the sake of the district.
“It’s a big organization, and at the end of the day, we’re trying to keep our network safe and our student data safe,” he said. “There are good intentions there, even if things don’t work as well as people want all the time, and I think the department is actively trying to find ways to make connectivity better.”
Hutson stresses the urgency of the issue, and feels that many staff and students cannot do their jobs at the level they strive to due to matters that are out of their control.
“This is impacting our students,” he said. “It’s impacting our teachers, which impacts students’ education. And sometimes when you’re in your little world of your job, you don’t realize what’s going on around you and the impact it has. It’s impacting people, probably to a greater extent than they may know. It’s preventing people from doing their job.”
Cearley doubles down on her belief that if Clayton is what it says it is, they must do better and limit its students from preventable inconveniences.
“We need to make sure that whatever exists in our building exists in a way that encourages student success and engagement and limits unnecessary frustrations as much as possible,” Cearley said.

Meyers calls on all frustrated members of the Clayton community to seek change and speak their minds regarding this and any other issues they are passionate about.
“The biggest thing that students should take away from this story is recognizing that if you have concerns and frustrations in school, you just need to talk about it and to criticize it because maybe this problem will be fixed next year or in the next couple of months,” Meyers said. “You never know, but there would have been no way to know if this problem was gonna be solved if we didn’t talk about it.”