September 2007 — Features
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Disaster Recovery :: Courting Disaster
That's a lesson learned echoed by every educator who has been through a disaster: Communication is critical during times of crisis, so keep some avenue open, be it e-mail, phones, or internet. To that end, some school districts are looking at or adopting strategies such as off-site storage and management of communication systems, including e-mail and telecom.
STARTING OVER Charley smashed
Charlotte County Public Schools' Baker
Center. The pre-K facility
would become
the district's first completely rebuilt school,
reopening this past August.
Bress credits Charlotte County's wireless broadband network with enabling the district to stay in touch with parents, students, teachers, and administrators after Charley hit. The district installed the wireless network about a year earlier, mostly because some of the older schools did not have the infrastructure to support traditional wired systems, Bress says. It was a bonus that the setup got communications up and running in just a matter of days after the storm blew through.
"After the first few days," Bress says, "we were able to get a big generator attached to one of our schools that could provide power to radios, and we had internet activity back to that school. That was critical because it would take six weeks to get phone communications to that part of town. We could allow people to come in and send out e-mails and let people know they were okay.
"In a situation like that, it's bad enough that someone's world has been turned upside down, but if you can give them something that's somewhat normal, it gives them a better, safer feeling."
Setting Priorities
The catastrophes that attract the most news coverage are of the natural kind— earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes. But those aren't most commonly crippling to schools. According to a white paper by Washington-based education solutions provider ESP Solutions Group, loss of electrical power is the most frequent cause of a disaster in the K-12 space.
"When we put together our plan, we had to define what a disaster is for inbuilding, out-of-building, and regional disasters," says Tom Petry, director of technology at Collier County Schools in Naples, FL. "What else can happen besides a hurricane? So we included local power outages for extended periods of time, fires, etc. We absolutely did not want to have a disaster recovery plan that takes 24 hours to implement, and that was the starting point we worked from."
DAMAGE DONE At Punta Gorda
Middle School, after Charley blew
through, debris heaped up only
feet
away from chairs and desks that
remained untouched.
Indeed, disaster recovery plans should deal with myriad scenarios, from a malfunctioning sprinkler system to a school lockdown. IT administrators say that the top three considerations in any plan, for any situation, should be:
- communication (phone and/or e-mail)
- line-of-business applications (payroll, human resources, etc.)
- student information/administration
Petry says prioritization is critical in keeping operations running smoothly. "You can't have everything back up and running in eight hours, so you have to prioritize what you need in order to function," he explains. "For us, financial apps, e-mail, and VoIP fit into our eight-hour window. Instructional apps, however, don't fit." He adds that every software program seems essential, "but you have to figure out what is actually mission-critical."
