On Sept. 30, 2022, all students, staff and administrators within the Sweetwater Union High School District (SUHSD) had to deal with their personal school emails being disabled. The shutdown occurred over the course of a three-day period, from Friday, Sept. 30 to Monday, Oct. 1. The accounts being disabled during this time left many to face various barriers with their obligations regarding school. 

Starting Sept. 19 to Oct. 3, Bonita Vista High (BVH) was on fall break. During the last few days of break, it was crucial for students to complete or catch up on any missing school work. But for Speech and Debate member and sophomore Mateo Pineda, his situation differed from other students. Being a member of the Speech and Debate team meant he had to finish work before a competition that was to happen on Oct. 1, prior to the shutdown of the school google accounts. 

“[I had] a speech tournament, so at that point, I had created my boards for my speech, and I was in the middle of practicing my speech and working on memorization. My school Google account was actually where I had written my speech. And at that point, that was the only account that I had access to that could view that document,” Pineda said. 

While Pineda had no access to his account, he still tried his best to remember the entirety of his speech and make up for the loss of the document he did not have viewership to. While he still accomplished full memorization, many of his fellow Speech and Debate team members tried to work through this situation despite the bad timing.  

“There were a bunch of different conversations between different people, and I think at one point, one of our members actually found a way to access their speech. I think that worked for a lot of people. I was not able to do that because of the device that I was using. But I think that that solution did help a lot of people on our team,” Pineda said.

While Pineda was dealing with this situation, Advanced Placement (AP) Calculus AB, AP Calculus BC and International Baccalaureate (IB) Math Analysis & Approaches Standard Level 1 teacher Benjamin Chan had always been prepared for situations like this that may occur. For example, he had a backup plan when grading assignments or just checking back on his work.

“I actually am a little bit paranoid with tech stuff. So I backup my stuff externally. I had the files that I needed to work on so I wasn’t severely impacted,” Chan said. “But my reaction was ‘oh, yeah, this is not going to be good for students or for teachers.’ For example, it had affected teachers getting ready for the new week [returning from fall break] and then obviously for students trying to complete assignments.” 

Although Chan was prepared with all his work being backed up, the loss of access to school accounts created the barrier of communicating with students or allowing them to catch up on work became a problem.

“Jupiter was still fine, so I was still able to access that. The other issue was just knowing that my students needed to turn some stuff in. So I did extend some deadlines for their homework, because of the Google outage,” Chan said. 

Pineda’s fellow Speech and Debate member and junior Brianna Magtoto experienced the hardships of losing her speech documents, all while trying to adapt her best in this inconvenient situation.  

“I had no idea that this was going to happen. I didn’t know that they had emailed us so when I didn’t have access to all of my documents, I panicked. Thankfully, I was able to print my speech since I had it opened previously,” Magtoto said.

Though Magtoto was able to regain her speech, she definitely did panic more for her teammates on Speech and Debate. But specifically, the novices—new members who were preparing for their first speech tournament of the year. 

“I only had a minor setback when I first found out that our accounts were disabled. I thought that I wasn’t going to be able to finish memorizing my speech but the Speech and Debate team immediately tried to find solutions for others who were struggling,” Magtoto said. “Novices on our team were especially harmed because some of them needed to print their scripts to use in their performances.”

As a whole, Pineda, Magtoto and Chan all collectively agree that SUHSD should have notified or even explained to the schools why this event happened. If the district does ever disable google accounts again, they should be more clear about why this ultimately occurred. 

“I think it would have been nice for the district to be a little bit more transparent about what happened and what they’re doing to prevent it from happening again. But I can’t judge what I don’t know. But definitely, they haven’t necessarily told everyone what exactly happened,” Chan said.