A new printing system, piloted last year by faculty and staff, has been rolled out to students to make printing documents more accessible and eco-friendly.

For the 2019-20 school year, the technology department introduced a new printing system to students in the upper school. Previously, students would email a document to be printed to an email address that corresponded with a printer in the school. This year, students upload documents to a website, and then ‘release’ the document to be printed using their student ID card at the desired printer.

According to technology director Peter Evans, the ID method of printing was used by teachers last year. “Last year for our faculty, we created a system where print jobs are sent to a pool of copiers, teachers then use their ID to release the prints at the copier of their choice. And then this year, we extended that to Upper School students as well,” Evans said.

The decision to roll out ID printing to students was made by Evans last year. “We have the hope was that it made it a little bit more efficient for students to use, giving them easier access to more printers throughout the building,” Evans said. “It also gave us the ability to upgrade those printers into scanners and copiers and to give students the ability to use those features as well.”

Many students are unhappy with the new printing system and preferred the email-to-print system from last year. Sophomore Evan Ehrhart says that the new printing system is overly complicated and that the system from last year was better. “When I first tried to print something, it took me about 20 minutes to print it,” Ehrhart said. “Before it was very obvious, you just printed to the printer. And that was it, instead of having to log into everything.”

Junior Benji Gourdji has not found the new printing system to be troublesome. “I have not printed so much this year, as I try not to,” Gourdji said. “But what little printing I have done this year, hasn’t really inconvenienced me.”

A point of confusion for many students, including Ehrhart, is the ‘print cost’ number displayed on student’s computers when documents are sent to print. But, according to Evans, students are not being charged to print. “Those costs are built in for our own tracking. We can’t make them not show up,” Evans said.

Evans also hopes that the new printing system will help cut down on waste. “It also helps with people who either forget that they print something or print something and realize they don’t need it,” he said.

“After 12 hours, if that print job is not printed out, it just gets deleted,” Evans said. “So in the case of faculty and staff last year, we saved 40,000 sheets of paper by having print jobs deleted after 12 hours. And I’m hoping some of that happens with the students as well.”

For Evans, the point of introducing the new printing system is to improve the experience of students, as well as to cut down on paper usage. “My goal is to just reduce printing in general,” Evans said. “And I’m all happy to hear anyone’s ideas for how we can make that happen.”