Teachers at northern Ontario school board fall back on 'old school' methods after 'cyber incident'
Network access at Rainbow District School Board based in Sudbury has been down since Friday
Teachers at the Rainbow District School Board in northeastern Ontario have had to return to "old school" methods after a "cyber incident" led to a system-wide network disruption on Friday.
The Rainbow Board has 38 schools, mostly in Sudbury, but also in the town of Espanola and on Manitoulin Island.
Eric Laberge, president for Rainbow District at the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation, said the disruption in technology and networked services at the school board has been especially challenging for younger teachers.
"They've had to essentially go to old school methods, which for a lot of younger teachers is something that they're not necessarily familiar with," he said.
"And in the spirit of co-operation, I always hope that some of our more seasoned veterans are in a position to help out their younger colleagues managing the day-to-day."
On Friday, the school board said it had experienced a " system-wide network disruption… due to a cyber incident."
On Tuesday, the school board issued an update to staff and parents, and said it was still "working diligently with third-party experts" to assess the impact of the cyber incident and fix the issues.
Laberge said that on Wednesday, teachers and other staff members were still unable to access the internet and the school board's network, and had to turn in their work laptops so they could be inspected.
He said high school teachers and students are especially impacted by the outage, because they are often more reliant on network access.
"We've heard from several members, not only over the weekend, but in the last couple of days, in terms of the unknown about how long this is going to be going on for, the amount of preparation that they've had to do, not being able to rely on the technology that's not available to them," Laberge said.
The Rainbow District School Board has not responded to requests for comment.
In its public updates to staff members and parents, the school board has not outlined the cause of the "cyber incident" or exactly what happened.