Published September 30, 2020
By DAN TOMASELLO
LYNNFIELD — The school system was the victim of thousands of cyber attacks over the course of the first two weeks of the academic year.
Superintendent Kristen Vogel told the School Committee on Sept. 24 that the district’s internet started getting attacked after the first day of school concluded on Sept. 16.
“What we know is they are outside sources from other countries from all over the world,” said Vogel. “They began inundating our system with the intention of bringing our internet down. On Thursday, Sept. 17, we received 17,000 attacks to our system, which essentially disabled our major network bandwidth and brought it down. We are fortunate that we have a backup internet provider, but it did not have the bandwidth to sustain ‘Zooming’ for over a hundred teachers.”
Vogel said the cyber attacks prevented students from logging online and forced the district’s internet to repeatedly crash on Sept. 17 and Sept. 18.
“When this happens, usually it happens once and not every day,” said Vogel. “We were getting attacked every day.”
Vogel said school officials tried to resolve the problem by working with the district’s main internet provider as well a consultant, but she said it was “unsuccessful.”
“Over the weekend, we made the decision to give teachers the option to teach from home,” said Vogel. “But our teachers love teaching in their classrooms where they have all their materials, and their preference was to be in their classrooms. What we found was we were still struggling and our network was still getting attacked.”
With the school system’s internet still being attacked on Tuesday, Sept. 22, Vogel said High School Principal Bob Cleary and Middle School Principal Stephen Ralston decided to have students learn asynchronously while learning at home.
“We wanted to decrease the number of people Zooming,” said Vogel. “That didn’t make much of a difference. It wasn’t good for our internet and it wasn’t good for the kids, so we made the decision that we would shift back to synchronous learning as we had been doing before.”
School Committee Vice Chairman Rich Sjoberg noted he, Vogel, Educational Technology Director Stephanie Hoban and Town Administrator Rob Dolan met with the district’s secondary internet provider on Sept. 23 in order to rectify the problem.
“There were elbows squeezed and favors called in by our state representatives, our selectmen and Rob Dolan,” said Sjoberg. “They got us to the point where we could get back online. A representative from the second provider said they could have somebody here on (Sept. 24), but Kristen said, ‘No, it needs to be today.’”
Vogel agreed.
“I think we are in a very good place to move forward with our internet,” said Vogel. “We essentially have two plans in place to support our teachers.”
School Committee Chairman Jamie Hayman thanked local and state officials for helping the School Department resolve the technology issues.
“I want to thank State Rep. Brad Jones and Education Commissioner Jeff Riley for getting involved,” said Hayman. “Rob Dolan and the Board of Selectmen helped every way that they could. I do want to call out Chris Barrett from our Board of Selectmen as he connected us to some folks who are doing technology consulting for Everett schools and Burlington schools, and that was able to fix all of this. I want to thank everyone for dropping what they were doing to get our schools back online as quickly as possible.”
Barrett, who was recently appointed principal of the Webster School in Everett, told the Villager he put school officials in touch with a company called NorthEast Technology, Inc.
“I was proud to be a part of the solution to overcome our technology problems,” said Barrett. “I am always ready and willing to help make sure the students, families and teachers have everything they need to succeed. As a principal who helped lead the technology efforts in Everett, I know full well the challenges of remote learning and what is needed to be a complete success. The Board of Selectmen was happy to once again work with all involved to make sure our students and staff are back on track for the 2020-2021 school year.”
Hayman urged parents to remain patient in the event the school system encounters future technology issues.
“I want everyone to respond the same way the teachers have responded over the last couple of weeks with changes, things not going right and fixing things on the fly,” said Hayman. “If we stay focused on what we need to do, we are going to be fine. But we shouldn’t promise it’s going to be 100 percent glitch-free because we know it’s not going to be.”
Teaching and Learning Director Kevin Cyr said the district’s educators will be ready for when the hybrid plan begins on Tuesday, Sept. 29, but said school officials and educators might need to troubleshoot different issues that arise.
“We have got the best teachers who have the ability to deliver instruction in any format, but there are going to be hiccups that are out of their control,” said Cyr.
Hayman noted the community has “a lot of questions” about how were the cyber attacks able to occur.
“People have the right to ask could we have foreseen this coming and was there something we could have done differently to start the year,” said Hayman. “All of those are very valid questions and we have them too. We will get to the bottom of this. The first step in this process was getting the kids back online. We are not ignoring what caused the problem. We are going to do a review about what we could have done differently and what we can learn from this. We will share what we find with families. We want to prevent this from happening again.”
