Highline Public Schools closed Monday, citing technology-related crisis
Thanks for the tips. Highline Public Schools has announced that a technology problem will close all its schools tomorrow (Monday, September 9) though some staffers are still expected to come to work. Here’s the full announcement from the district’s website:
All schools are closed on Monday, September 9. All school activities, athletics and meetings are canceled, including the vaccine clinic. Central office is open.
We have detected unauthorized activity on our technology systems and have taken immediate action to isolate critical systems. We are working closely with third-party, state and federal partners to safely restore and test our systems.
We understand this comes as an unexpected disruption, particularly on the eve of the first day of kindergarten for many of our families. We recognize the burden this decision places on both families and staff, but student safety is our top priority, and we cannot have school without these critical systems in place. …
School and central office administrators are expected to report to work. Central office administrators may be deployed to schools if needed.
The investigation is ongoing. We will notify staff and families by 2:00 p.m. on Monday if this disruption impacts schools on Tuesday.
Highline just started its 2024-2025 year this past week.
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September 9th, 2024 at 2:16 pm
Ugh, when I was a kid we had snow days, but no malware infection days. Having spent the entirety of my working life as a computer programmer it seems like sheer folly to me that trusting anything mission critica to software with no low tech fallback (once you see how the sausage is made, you can’t unsee that).
The standards seem to be particularly low for software targeted at a specific niche industry/customer as well as for low cost commodity hardware (WiFi access points, IP security cameras, etc.) so this isn’t exactly a surprise but it’s depressing (and frustrating for my son whose plans are being strung along day by day as this gets sorted out).