At the beginning of the school year, MN received numerous additions to its building. One of these new additions was the installation of printing kiosks in every MPS high school.

Each printing kiosk includes two printers that have multiple paper drawers, holding over 1500 sheets of paper. The printers are attached to one computer, and are stationed in several, easy to access, areas around the building. The kiosks can be found at nine different locations in each department throughout the building. Their locations are in the Media Center, Mustang Center, the Math/IT, Language Arts, World Language, Art, Science/FCS, Science/Physics, and Business/Social Studies Areas.

One of the special features that accompany the new printing stations are the brand new color printers. As well as the traditional black and white printers, students now have the option to print with color instead of being stuck with the mundane option of only printing black and white.

Additionally, the printing kiosks allow for students to print and pick up their papers at different locations throughout the school. Now, students can print a job for later from the Language Arts kiosk and pick it up at the Media Center when they’re ready. The decision to change the printing systems not only made color printing more accessible, but had other motives as well.

“The motivation of the printing centers is to decrease the number of print jobs that the school goes through. Mainly, it is used to reduce the overall cost of the printing. As a school, we burn through a lot of paper on a yearly basis. The new printing kiosks are a way the school can reduce that volume of paper, which is a benefit to the school and to the environment,” Technology Facilitator Jeff Yost said.

Despite the benefits, there could be some negative aspects to these new printing centers.

“I haven’t really noticed any flaws with the printing kiosks. However, printing has become more time-consuming and sometimes it won’t print for a minute or so,” senior Trevor Daubert said.

With some problems arising from the printing centers, the question of how successful they are is posed.

“I think the new printing stations are really beneficial because the kids who needed to print color, but didn’t have a color printer at home, are able to do so at the kiosks. People are also very judicious about how much they choose to print, knowing that they have a set amount of printing money at the stations,” librarian Stephanie Burdic said.

Printing is a vital part of high school and it serves as the cornerstone of many students’ successes and failures in their classes. Therefore, these new printing kiosks will serve to be more beneficial in the future.

“I think they will be necessary when everyone is one to one. We are going to have a school full of students with laptops who are going to need places to print, and having them always go to the library to print will be too much. It will be more convenient for classes as a whole when they’re using those one to one devices,” English teacher Monica Kauffman said.