Virtual learning got off to a rough start for Toledo Public Schools, but district officials expect a turnaround during the second week of online instruction.
The district’s first day of classes Tuesday was disrupted when information-technology staff detected a computer virus that prompted them to shut down TPS’s internet service and emails.
Technical issues continued Wednesday as a result of the suspected cyberattack that had halted classes the day before.
While district administrators said they were unaware of any widespread disruptions to instruction Wednesday, communications from individual schools to families, as well as frustration from parents and guardians vented on social media, suggested problems persisted.
James Gault, TPS’s executive transformational leader of curriculum, told The Blade that all internet services were restored to the district Wednesday.
“The internet is up and running. Right now we’re experiencing issues that we expected to see at this point,” Mr. Gault said. “In some cases, they are some buffering issues and spottiness issues on the receiving end, and these are things we asked the community to be patient with us as we work through those various issues. But our internet is up and running and has been since Wednesday and we see that continuing,”
Mr. Gault said the district still had to find the safest way to restore its E-school program, which is a database for student demographics and data.
“We still have to get E-school up and running,” he said. “E-school is an important component because that’s how we schedule students into our various classrooms. This is our biggest priority right now, because as people are coming into the district, we have to schedule them into courses and we can’t do that right now with E-school down.”
The E-school problems were not directly affecting online instruction through Google Classrooms, Mr. Gault said, but were blocking new enrollments and schedule changes and preventing attendance from being logged online.
“We’re having to do paper-pencil attendance and will have to enter that once E-school is up and running,” he said.
Jim Gant, the district’s deputy superintendent of schools, said E-school restoration efforts continue with outside assistance.
“We’ve engaged the FBI and a third-party cybersecurity provider so we’ll restore it as soon as feasibly possible. We just want to be methodical about how we do it and make sure everything is done the appropriate way,” he said.
Remote learning, Mr. Gant said, is challenging enough by itself without the suspected cyberattack, and district officials “ask that families be patient and know that we’re doing our best,” he said.
“The cyberattack added a dimension that we, of course, were not expecting, but we responded to it as quickly as we could,” Bob Vasquez, the Toledo Board of Education’s president, agreed.
District officials will continue to evaluate health regulations and recommendations as they pursue a goal of eventually returning students to classrooms, Mr. Vasquez said.
“We’re still working the plan we laid out, which was to begin completely virtual and then hopefully go to the hybrid system and eventually return to the level where we can have all of students and staff back into our buildings,” he said. “That is everyone’s eventual goal. We just have to be conscious because we have the health of the community to consider. What we do as a district is related to the spread of the virus within the community.”
First Published September 12, 2020, 7:36 p.m.
