The Allentown School District is in its third day of work to fully restore technology services after a Wednesday morning power fluctuation disrupted cooling systems at the district’s main data center.
The districtwide outage affected email, student logins, network shares, copiers and the staff intranet.
“To protect our infrastructure from further heat damage, some systems that store our data went offline automatically,” the district wrote in a Friday morning update to staff, nothing maintenance scheduled to start at 10 p.m. and continue through the weekend should fully restore service.
Email was back up Friday and the remaining systems were “being restored in planned phases to guarantee platform stability,” the update said.
With student-facing platforms offline, teachers lost access to digital resources and assessment programs.
Scheduled reading and math tests designed to assess progress after the first four-week unit were interrupted for Daniel Rohe, a fifth grade teacher at Ramos Elementary School. Rohe, who is in his 15th year of teaching and his first year with the district, said it’s “been a struggle” to figure out how to adjust his lesson calendar amid uncertainty about when systems would be back online.