With the academic year winding down this week in Washington Local Schools, students were introduced to lessons the way it was conducted decades ago in classrooms across America — sans internet.
The district has been without Internet or Wi-Fi since last week following a cyberattack that likewise affected the district's phones, email, and Google Classroom.
Superintendent Kadee Anstadt said Tuesday that the district has a cybersecurity insurance policy and that a forensic team is investigating the incident. Phones have since been restored and employees can now use email — as long as they’re not trying to do so on Washington Local’s server — but it’s unclear when internet access would be reestablished.
“We don’t anticipate having internet the rest of the week, so we’ll finish our school year back in the 1990s-way without the internet,” she said. “We taught school like this for a lot of years — when I taught school we didn’t use internet — and so this week kids will be reading from books and doing a lot of their math on paper.
“Gratefully this occurred during the last week of school and ungratefully it’s the last week of school because it’s causing a lot of angst,” she added. “But gratefully we’re down to our end-of-year assemblies and concerts — those kinds of things that don’t have the same need for the internet.”
Seniors were able to take their finals last week and on Sunday the district announced that Wednesday’s graduation ceremony for Whitmer High School would be moved from Memorial Stadium to the Huntington Center. Part of the reason was because of potential rain, but Ms. Anstadt said district officials were also concerned about successfully live-streaming the ceremony. The only way to do so at Whitmer would be to use a Wi-Fi hotspot, but there was concern the device would be inadequate for the task.
But the Huntington Center wasn’t the only group to offer assistance to the district. Ms. Anstadt said officials from the Toledo Lucas County Public Library — which also was hit by a cyberattack last October — offered the district Wi-Fi hotspots, meeting space for administrators as well as students who were taking online courses, and use of the library’s printer.
“Huge shout-out to the [Toledo Lucas County Public Library] who made a ton of hotspots available to us and helped us during all this,” Ms. Anstadt said. “A lot of our teachers went to the library over the weekend and borrowed them so they could make use of them in the classroom this week."
Jason Kucsma, the library’s executive director, said the district assisted the library when it suffered a ransomware attack that encrypted its data and demands a ransom to unlock the files. Officials believe patron and staff information wasn’t compromised as part of the cyberattack, but Mr. Kucsma said those initial days after such an incident are incredibly stressful, adding Washington Local Schools likewise assisted the library by offering printing, space, and other services staff needed to continue working.
“You quickly realize how many things you take for granted that you access through online resources,” he said. “When we went through our attack, it was a pretty isolating and lonely experience because we were the only institution going through that crisis at the moment, so we reached out to Kadee to see how we could help since our experience was so fresh and recent.
“We were just trying to be good neighbors to them just as they were good neighbors to us when we were going through our own cybersecurity attack,” he added.
Meanwhile, Friday marks the last day of school for the district and Ms. Anstadt said she anticipates teachers will finish grading on-time next week so that student report cards will go out as scheduled in early June.
First Published May 26, 2022, 3:00 p.m.
