The days of anxiously awaiting our school report card grades may be far behind us, but remain a vivid part of our memory. Instead of face-to-face parent-teacher conferences and paper report cards, most schools rely on their technology to communicate with students, teachers, and parents. Can you imagine the school’s full supply of report card paper going missing the day before grades were due? For one county in California, the virtual version of this scenario occurred, leaving an embarrassing situation for the school and students, and left parents in the dark.
The Yolo County school districts encountered a host of internet outages in schools after a routine maintenance-related electrical outage was scheduled to disable the network for two hours. The routine maintenance turned into a nightmare after an equipment failure triggered the outage, which led to a blackout that lasted until Thursday afternoon.
Due to the outages, teachers were unable to post progress report grades before deadlines. It also left parent and student communications unanswered for over a day. King High teacher Blair Howard said, “The Internet/email outage was a reminder of how dependent our instruction and communication as educators is on being connected to the Internet…As we push forward with implementing the Common Core assessments and putting technology in the hands of our students, it is imperative that the district secure reliable Internet access.”
In a related article released days after the outage, the Davis school district announced that they are exploring a possible backup service provider. Superintendent Winfred Roberson said, “We are exploring a backup network protocol that will provide some level of redundancy in the event that such an outage reoccurs.” A backup ISP would allow the district to have available bandwidth in the case that their primary network failed.
Downtime can negatively impact any business or organization. When a reliable WAN is critical to operations, Ecessa technology for WAN link failover, load-balancing, management and optimization ensures networks have a consistent, high-quality connection. Ecessa’s family of WAN devices provide the Never Down™ performance today’s schools need to support online learning, testing, communication and administration.
Although the outage may have allowed a D student an additional day without being grounded, it put the schools and staff’s technology in detention. Don’t drop out, stay connected with Ecessa.