Thursday, August 21, 2008
Published Wednesday, August 06, 2008 in Education
15 schools lose Internet service for two hours
The Times-Herald
Administrative personnel from the Coweta County School System were dispatched to all of its 30 schools Wednesday morning to help thwart any first-day-of-school problems, but some -- as every year -- are unavoidable.
"It's not a question of whether something's going to go wrong, it's a question of how big it's going to be," said Dean Jackson, Coweta Schools' public information officer.
For Coweta, it started out with Wednesday morning's Internet service going down for about half of its schools. The Internet is used for various functions, including registration, taking attendance and classroom instruction.
A construction crew working on the roundabout being built at Greison Trail and Lower Fayetteville Road had damaged some fiber optic lines that provide the Internet service to roughly about 15 schools, said David Thibadeau, Coweta Schools' computer information officer.
The services affected included the Internet, e-mail, Infinite Campus (the system's new Web-based technology that records attendance, grades and other student information) and the new interactive whiteboards teachers use in their classrooms.
So when the Internet went down, school personnel defaulted to the old way of doing things.
They made phone calls instead of using e-mail. They recorded information by hand versus entering it on a keyboard, and students were asked to open their textbooks rather than following the material on the whiteboard.
Principal Cheryl Sanborn of White Oak Elementary said she just advised her teachers to "drop back and punt."
Thibadeau was initially told services would be down all day. But Internet services were back up in about two hours, according to Mike Mayo, technical operations manager for NuLink -- the company that recently purchased the Newnan Utilities digital services operation.
"When we first looked at the damage, our initial assessment wasn't nearly as good as it turned out to be. Once we got in, it went really quickly, so we were very happy with that," Mayo said.
Meanwhile, at Welch Elementary, some parents suffered a bottleneck with the school system's photo-based visitor log. Visitors to any school campus in Coweta are required to sign in using the Ident-a-Kid computer program, which issues each visitor a temporary photo ID badge if they are planning to go beyond the front office.
Since it was the first day of school, there were several parents who wanted to accompany their children to their classroom -- thus they were required to sign in to get the photo badge issued, creating the logjam. When the lines for the Ident-a-Kid entries started forming early on and snaking around the building, Principal Becky Darrah said that's when "we saw that it was too much the first day."
"We just had a lot of people that came, and we're proud that we had that many," she said. "The parents were very, very gracious with us."
Overall, while things are typically chaotic for the first day, all ran smoothly at area schools, according to Jackson.
"It takes the first week for everything to get sorted out, but all the big things worked very, very well for getting those 21,000 students through today. For all we had to do today, those other things were just an inconvenience."