By Andrew Martins, Managing Editor
Additional redundancies for a digital resource that teachers in the Hillsborough Township Public School District use on a daily basis could be in the works, after multiple system failures over the holiday proved to be concerning for officials.
At the Nov. 28 Board of Education meeting, Hillsborough Education Association President Henry Goodhue and Superintendent Dr. Jorden Schiff outlined and discussed the problems surrounding the Genesis system, which teachers use to record grades and retain student records.
“Our district has invested millions of dollars in technology and often celebrates the dividends of this investment. The work of our students and staff is rightfully praised,” Mr. Goodhue said. “But noting what has not worked is of importance as well.”
According to officials, a series of technological issues with the system resulted in the loss of grading information and as a result, caused a delay in the delivery of report cards before teachers were expected to hold conferences with students’ parents.
Due to system failures, Mr. Goodhue said potential lost information includes “course page information, report card comments, lesson plans … attendance information, clerical information, and nursing notes related to students’ health and safety.”
“Each time the system crashed the information was possibly lost again, resulting in some staff members being required to re-enter information three times,” he said.
Those issues continued into the Thanksgiving break, when Mr. Goodhue said teachers were told that the system had been fixed and that they could “feel free to login and begin working.”
“(The teachers were) implicitly being instructed to cut their holiday short and blindly trust that whatever issue plagued Genesis had been resolved and information would not again be lost,” the HEA president said. “This is unacceptable.”
To that end, Dr. Schiff pointed out that the district’s tech department toiled during the break to make sure the system was back up and running in the first place.
“It should be known that our tech department worked over the Thanksgiving vacation, over the weekends, into the late evenings and were servicing this to the very best of their abilities,” he said.
Speaking on what may have caused the situation, Dr. Schiff said a recent update to the Genesis system’s servers seemed to be the start of the problems. Specifically, he said that although there are backups in place, technicians had to revert the software to a previous instance, causing the loss in data.
“Before we made the fix, our Genesis server remained on a virtual server. There was an update that went to the virtual server and that update seemed to coincide with those problems,” he said.
Since then, Dr. Schiff said the system has been moved to a physical server, which he described as a “long-term fix” that has seemingly alleviated the issue.
Though he noted that this was the first instance of a major failure with the Genesis system since it was purchased five years ago, Dr. Schiff said the district has begun looking into additional solutions in the event that problems crop up again.
“It is very disappointing when something fails in the district, but we have looked at additional redundancies for the Genesis system to make sure that if something goes down, we have an instant backup,” Dr. Schiff said. “It’s a critical infrastructure issue and our community, staff and students have come to depend that this works everyday.”
Those redundancies, however, would come at a financial cost that would be looked at during the budgetary process, he said.
“There was data that was lost. Teachers did have to do double work and that’s not something we’re happy with at all,” Dr. Schiff said. “We need to take steps that that won’t occur again.”
