Slack, a team communication and messaging platform, was banned on the school districts’ Wi-Fi on September 26. Numerous school organizations such as Yearbook, Westview Theatre Company, Mock Trial, ASB, and Robotics have all relied on Slack for communication across campus for years. Now, students need to go home or switch to a hotspot to access this application. Members of these organizations now have to do more work and can’t receive notifications on campus. Slack provides students and organizations the opportunity to communicate with each other in an organization, without gathering dozens of phone numbers or sending emails back and forth to one another. 

Yearbook Editor-in-Chief Jade Becker (12) said that the Yearbook staff uses Slack as a tool for efficiency. The staff communicates when work is ready to be edited or reviewed. They share their work by linking it in Slack channels, but now they cannot access it while on school Wi-Fi.

Additionally, the Yearbook staff’s ability to capture Westview’s events and culture has been hindered, Becker explains, since Slack was used to alert each other about photos to take. 

“[Slack is] a very, very helpful tool [for sharing] overall information about what’s going on at school, like if there’s an event at lunch and someone needs to take photos really quick,” Becker said. “It’s really frustrating as a publication [that] strives to cover every single detail of school.”

Mock Trial president, Erjot Kaur (11) said that without Slack their competition is impacted since they struggle with alerting their team members with last-minute messages quickly.

“It’s very hard for me to communicate at school,” Kaur said. “[When] I want to send last minute reminders during the school day for our meetings, scrimmages or for competitions and I can’t do that [and] I have to hunt down our team members and [notify] them [in person] because they couldn’t see the Slack message or they saw it way too late,” 

According to Kaur, the ban establishes a negative factor in Mock Trial’s performance since it’s more difficult and inefficient to complete.

“Slack is a major way for [us] to communicate and [the block] definitely inhibits us from getting the work that we need to get done in order to perform the best at competition.”

For next year, Kaur said she hopes that Mock Trial can find better software to replace Slack.

“It’s too late to make the switch this year because we are a couple months into the season and changing our platform would be disruptive and tedious. It’s very hard to get [around] 25 people to switch [from] platforms they have been using for multiple years,” Kaur said, “We’ll look at other ventures next year like Facebook Messenger or a big group chat.”

The Theatre Company has also been adversely impacted by the Slack block. Theatre director Robert Townsend said that they used Slack as a collective group chat, but also as a series of smaller, isolated group chats for different groups within the company. This allowed students to effectively organize their collaboration in one application.

“It takes years to cultivate a good communications platform that is sufficient for [our] diverse needs,” Townsend said. “As we try to [find] a new platform, we have to re-cultivate the entire directory, get [everyone] used to [the interface], [and] import all the data. [Slack] allowed us to structure our groups into ways that were very effective for communication, and the collaboration that was possible through Slack just made everything a lot easier.”

 Townsend said the Westview Theatre Company hopes to combat this ban by looking for new platforms to communicate such as Facebook Messenger.

“[Slack] was our main form of communication,” Townsend said. “As we try to work on a new platform to use for communication, we have to re-cultivate the entire directory. We have to get everybody used to the new [interface], as well as import all the data. Students and teachers now have to do extra work at home to make sure they’re keeping up on things that are happening.”