By Cal Clapper

Emails are a vital tool to connect people in the professional and academic worlds, but McCaskey student emails are inaccessible. Having an email address allows students to quickly and professionally contact teachers, employers, and colleges; and access information about possible internships or opportunities that could be open to them. Every McCaskey student has a school email linked to their ID number and while these emails are useful for creating accounts and logins, they are unusable as actual email addresses. 

McCaskey students cannot send or receive emails from their school email address. Instead, students use Schoology messaging and Remind to contact their teachers and peers. These apps offer great connections within McCaskey but don’t allow for communication with parties outside of school. This means that if a McCaskey student wants to receive messages from colleges or possible employers, they have to create and manage a personal email. Due to the limited access to personal emails students have on their school iPads, students who have personal devices they can use are ahead of students who rely entirely on their school-issued iPads.

One solution to this email issue is to inform students on how to access their personal emails on their school iPads so they don’t have to rely on a personal device. Out of a survey of McCaskey students, 81% said that they didn’t think that they could access their personal emails on their school iPads. While neither school nor personal emails are able to be opened on Google Chrome, if the browser is switched to Safari it is possible to open and login to a personal email. This gives students the ability to balance their communication on one device as opposed to switching devices between home and school.

While usable school emails would be undeniably helpful, there could be drawbacks to giving students a way to communicate on their school iPads. Cell Phone use is already a big problem at McCaskey, and emails might become another distraction for students who would misuse them. Just like airdrop, emails could be used for non-school related communication which could be a distraction during class. 

Whether or not they would be overall beneficial, it’s clear that the lack of accessible email makes a big impact on students and how they communicate inside our school environment.