A series of unfortunate events devastated School District 43's email and voicemail this week but it should be be restored sometime tomorrow (Friday).
Email communication for 73 SD43 buildings serving 40,000 staff and students went down last Friday because a generator failed to start after a power outage and the uninterruptible power supply only has battery life for 30 minutes.
Daniel Cook, manager of systems, said his staff worked all weekend and two days and nights to restore servers but, by Wednesday, only abut 75% of the district's 24 digital mailboxes were restored. Today, some communications is still down and the district website asks parents to phone in information about absentee students.
The outage has also affected the distribution of online forms and other communication and voicemails couldn't be accessed for most of the week.
"Anything that involved sending files was not functioning," said superintendent Tom Grant.
When Grant was finally able to get into his email Wednesday, he said, he had 300 messages waiting for him. "Catching up" was the biggest issue for district staff because while inconvenient, the outage did not affect SD43's secure data system, including student information, which is stored off-site.
The generator is being repaired and Grant said it was a surprise that it was not functioning because it is on a regular maintenance schedule.
