After a days-long outage, a digital education network employed by dozens of New York City schools is still working on getting systems back up and running. After a “security issue” on January 8, Illuminate Education, which owns popular school administration platforms Skedula and PupilPath, stated it is still working to restore service.
According to the company’s status update website, Illuminate Education claims it has suffered a service disruption impacting all IO Classroom applications for approximately 10 days. Since January 11, they haven’t released a fresh update. It’s still unconfirmed whether the platform’s data was exposed during the hack, and the New York City Department of Education has yet to reply to demands for comment.
Several teachers have informed The New York Times and other local media sites that they use the platforms often to interact with parents and monitor students’ grades. The outages have come at an unfavorable moment for teachers dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak as recent snow days and other concerns have disrupted the school year. Illuminate Education issued a statement clarifying that the incident was a “security problem” after teachers complained about the company’s lack of notification.
Officials from the city declined to reveal how many schools use the program, but the corporation claims to service 5,200 districts and schools nationwide. According to records acquired by The New York Post, the corporation has made $16 million in the previous three years from Department of Education schools. As per the site, administrators’ efforts to monitor which children had COVID-19 were hampered by the outages because students who test positive have everyone in their courses tested as well.
Teachers have found it challenging to recognize which classes a student attends and which pupils need to be assessed without access to student timetables. ChalkBeat obtained a copy of a letter issued to parents, which states that service will be restored in stages and that another update will be given out on Tuesday.
