By Patrick Webb
InkFreeNews

LARWILL — Corrupted data containing students’ grades has been recovered at Whitko Community Schools, following a server failure.

According to a recording of a Whitko Community School Board workshop meeting on Wednesday, April 10, provided by a parent who asked not to be named, Whitko Director of Technology Jason Cline reported that the school suffered a drive failure, possibly caused by power issues.

“We were able to restore everything in the district except for PowerSchool,” said Cline in the recording.

PowerSchool, according to the company’s website, provides software and cloud-based services for schools and is used in over 90 countries. Cline said that the IT department had found a backup storing grades that dated back to Jan. 20, covering the first semester of the year.

Cline said the data currently lost covers students’ grades following Jan. 20 to March. He also said that data recovery specialists are currently working to retrieve the data and that Whitko has purchased additional safeguards to avoid a repeat of the situation.

In the recording an unidentified person states that 80% of schools that use PowerSchool use cloud storage to avoid data losses, and asked Cline why Whitko didn’t use cloud storage.

“We had a dedicated server created for it, long as I’ve been here,” said Cline. He said the server hosts other programs, such as for the library system.

According to Warsaw Community Schools’ Director of Communications and Strategic Partnership Krista Polston, Warsaw, which also uses PowerSchool, has PowerSchool host their program in the cloud, “which ensures data protection.”

“Our Chief Technology and Analytics Officer, Kyle Carter, confirms that in the event of a system failure, we can restore our database to its previous state, such as rolling back to yesterday’s data if an incident occurred today,” said Polston. “This redundancy ensures that we do not lose student data due to local server issues.”

Whitko Community Schools’ Superintendent Tim Pivarnik said at the workshop that a worst case scenario was the data from January to March being lost. Pivarnik stated in the recording that a specialist informed him it was “highly likely” that corrupted files could be recovered, “but we have to say, nothing’s 100%. But to say that all (the data) is permanently gone is not an accurate statement.”

When reached for comment, Pivarnik stated “we have successfully recovered all of our PowerSchool data. All system updates should be complete allowing us to reinstall this data file by Wednesday of next week.”

PowerSchool did not respond to a request for comment.