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Statewide school computer system outage affecting parents, teachers

The system also handles payroll, but the CEO of the company that uses it says there are backup plans to get people paid.
Credit: yanyong
(Credit: Thinkstock)

Teachers, parents, and payroll managers have been without access to a real-time computer system used by nearly every school district in Washington state since Monday. It's hoped the system will be restored on Wednesday.

The system is called Skyward -- a student information, finance, and human resources data system. The outage affects 274 of 295 school districts. That's according to Marty Daybell, CEO of the Washington School Information Processing Cooperative (WSIPC), which uses Skyward.

Daybell says parents use Skyward to be able to see their child's attendance, what they had for lunch, any behavior issues, and communications from teachers.

Teachers use it to take attendance and post grades. Daybell says teachers have to put this information on spreadsheets during the outage.

The system is also used to process payroll around this time of the month. Daybell says that can't be done with the system down. If Skyward can't be re-launched Wednesday as planned, Daybell said there are backup plans in place to make sure people get paid on time.

Skyward officials say the problem started last Friday when WSIPC attempted to perform a firmware upgrade to their data center which resulted in incompatibility issues with their server farm.

"Unfortunately, this created the major interruption to their customers by preventing access to Skyward along with other applications," Skyward Chief Marketing Officer Raymond Ackerlund said in an email to KING 5. Ackerland said the outage is not related to Skyward's product, but it was one of the many systems affected by WSIPC's data center.

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