Students, teachers clash over printers

“I ran out of paper; could you please print this for me?”

This was an email sent by a student to freshman English teacher Kathleen Bowman. This is just one of the many examples of student printer problems that teachers have had to face.

“Sometimes, when there’s something due, a group of students need something printed,” English teacher Jan Willis said.

Computer teacher Erik Amerikaner puts it simply: the school has “an issue with printer availability.” And it isn’t just Oak Park.

“How students have access to printing and who is responsible is a question nationwide,” Amerikaner said.

Bowman acknowledges the hardship of determining where to draw the line between the responsibility of students and the responsibility of the school.

“When we guarantee students a free and public education, we need to make resources available to students in need,” Bowman said, “but it’s also difficult to pinpoint what is an availability issue and what is a responsibility issue.”

Humanities teacher David Kinberg believes that it is the school’s obligation to provide the resources a student may need.

“If a school project’s 17 pages, [the students] should be able to print 17 pages,” Kinberg said.

Sophomore Matthew Lee said he agreed.

“I think it is [the school’s] responsibility as long as [students] don’t abuse the system,” Lee said. “Students should be allowed to print a few documents if they want.”

In contrast, some believe that students should be in charge of printing out their own papers.

“It’s not required for [the school] to [print]; it’s just a nice thing that they do,” junior Samantha Lee said.

Junior Abhi Gowder said she agreed.

“It’s your responsibility to bring your stuff to school,” Gowder said. “You can talk to your teacher if you have any issues and they’ll understand.”

There are a few places that are available on campus should a student try to print something at school. The Oak Park library is one option, but is only open during lunchtime and is closed on Fridays.

“Even when the library is open, students need to pay to print,” Bowman said. “We need to ask ourselves whether [students] should pay to print.”

A more common resource for printing is Amerikaner’s classroom, the computer lab, where Amerikaner says approximately 10 to 15 people go to print each day. This influx of people only further aggravates the situation.

“I have sent people [to Amerikaner’s room] before and it did not go over well,” Willis said. “We teachers often are not aware of how many people need to print over in the computer lab. It’s a lot.”

The issue of printer availability is not limited to the needs of students — even teachers occasionally have trouble accessing fully functional printers on campus.

“I have to run all over campus to print stuff out,” Kinberg said. “The [closest printer] is about 10 years old.”

But perhaps it isn’t the printing that’s the problem; maybe there’s a problem with how students turn in schoolwork in the first place.

“As we become more technologically dependent, the question is how students should submit their work,” Amerikaner said. “If the faculty wants to see printed documents, we need to find a better system for students to submit their work.”

Promoting classroom use of technology, where digital documents take the place of physical ones, is one possible solution.

“The Google Classroom system can solve a lot of the issues,” Bowman said. “As teachers, we can start to look at ways to minimize our printing needs.”

Enoch Kwok, the district’s technology committee chair, also sees technology as a solution, but understands the complications that may come with it.

“How much of it is a training issue for teachers?” Kwok said. “How could you deal with a document submitted electronically, and how could you get it back to the student?”

Another solution, as Amerikaner suggested, would be for the school to “set up a dedicated printer center someplace” on campus.

Willis said she agreed with the notion.

“We could use a system like universities do where students load up cards with money and use that to print,” Willis said. “It could definitely reduce the load on the computer lab and our classroom-based printers.”

Students had mixed responses when asked about this solution.

“Maybe they can implement a rule where students who print excessively can be charged a few cents per page,” Lee said, “as long as it’s just a few pages, and not every day.”

Senior Lillian Ong disagreed that it was reasonable to expect students to pay.

“Printers are an essential tool for education,” Ong said. “We get a lot of funds for all this other technology—they should at least be able to provide printing to students.”

Kinberg’s solution is (in theory) simple.

“We should have more printers,” Kinberg said. “I would like a printer.”

As Principal Kevin Buchanan explains, however, printers and supplies have a very real cost.

“It’s a combination of site budget and the grant funds that keeps [printing] going,” Buchanan said.

For now, Willis will, with reasonable limits, allow students to use her own classroom printer.

“I’m much more generous when it’s a rare thing for a student to ask,” Willis said. “For the ones who will continuously say ‘it’s not working’ or ‘I forgot to print it,’ it gets old.”

But the first to solving any problem is to bring attention to it and talk about it.

“We’re in the process of fact-finding and establishing a committee to determine the feasibility of providing print services to students,” Buchanan said. “Something that’s cost-effective and incorporates all the other technology.”