It seemed like another day at school but many South Bay students experienced for themselves what learning was like some 30 years ago.
Teachers, students, and parents from the Sweetwater Union High School District were told on Tuesday that the school no longer had access to the internet.
“The district told us over the speaker as an announcement that they were having problems with the internet and when I went to the library, they also told me something’s bugging, I’m not sure,” Arles Borjas told NBC 7 Responds as he walked next to his mom, Estefani.
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The student at Castle Park Middle School in Chula Vista said they did not receive any explanation of why the internet was out.
Over at the Chula Vista Adult School, Roxanne Flores said she hopes this doesn’t interfere with her education.
“I was like, yeah, ok, I like using my book, I like writing,” she said, adding that the courses are a bit more difficult without access to online tools.
In a statement sent as a text (since access to school emails are down), SUHSD said:
“Sweetwater Union High School District (“SUHSD”) is aware of an information technology systems outage affecting the district and is conducting a thorough investigation. After learning of this incident, we immediately began an investigation to determine the cause and scope of the incident. This outage has had limited impact to school operations, including loss of some systems utilized by teachers and staff including email. We are working to restore these systems. We want our students and the SUHSD community to know that we place a high value on maintaining the integrity and security of the data we hold in our systems, and we are working diligently to complete our investigation of the incident. We will provide an additional update once our investigation is complete.”
We asked if they could be dealing with a system breach and how long might the students be without internet access. SUHSD referred us back to their statement.
Arles and his mom said they’re not really worried about the lack of internet as they trust administrators and teachers to not let this problem get in the way of their curricula.
“Not bad really, my teacher just kind of rolled with it with paper assignments and we turned it in like that,” the student said.
So for the time being, if parents want to communicate with a teacher or an administrator, a phone call is currently the best option.
