In early January schools across the country  scrambled to recover from the PupilPath crash.  The online grading system that is ubiquitous across America’s high schools was down for two weeks. For teachers it  meant a lose of their grades. Students were disconcerted, as the marking period was coming to an end, they had no way to tell if they were missing assignments.

   Schools are not required to publicly report cyberattacks, which limits the information we have on the subject but experts are speculating and have said that the public school system has limited budget for cybersecurity and has become an inviting target.

   Ms. Turner, a journalism teacher said, “this affected me a lot, we are always looking for people to interview for the newspaper, and this made it difficult. As a teacher I felt bad for my students because they couldn’t check what was being assigned or if they were missing work.” The collapse threw off the teacher’s grading and availability to communicate with their students. No one knew when Pupilpath would be back up, and students said that it was stressful to not see their classes and grades.

   A Facebook group, NYCSchoolsTech, had many posts realted to the crash. Some thought it was a simple malfunction while others others alluded to ransomware. With the rumor mill flowing there has been a variety of theories as to why the collapse happened.  No matter what the reason, we are grateful for the program to be up and running again.