HAGERSTOWN, MD (May 9, 2018) - Washington County Public Schools (WCPS) wants to keep our school community up to date regarding the ongoing Synergy Student System outage. The full restoration of Synergy, including ParentVUE and StudentVUE, is still anticipated to occur next week. WCPS would like to share more about the circumstances behind the outage and the process moving forward.

 

We understand, and can relate to, parents’ and guardians’ concerns regarding their child’s grades. We assure you, we are working diligently to determine a resolution with options that are in the best interest of our students with respect to 4th grading/marking period grades.

In addition, we also acknowledge this leaves school administrators, teachers, counselors, and other school support staff with questions about providing accurate and fair student grades for the remainder of the school year. It is evident that many teachers have various ways of tracking student progress and assignments; we want to ensure we fully take into consideration how those methods can be utilized to move forward with 4thmarking period assignments that were recorded before the outage. We are developing a plan for inputting 4th marking period assignments for when Synergy returns online, and we will provide another update when we have determined those details.
No personal student information was compromised in this instance. The following information will be rebuilt in Synergy from February 10th through April 27th:

·         Attendance

·         Course History

·         Synergy Student Grades (for grading periods 1, 2, 3)

·         New Students/Transfers

·         Student Classes and Sections

·         Discipline Incidents

 

WCPS has been utilizing Synergy Student Systems for the last five years. The school system has also relied on a vendor who has been contracted to supervise, monitor, and manage WCPS’ backup data storage environment since 2012. In previous communications, we discussed the new backup system that will be housed at the former Central Office building with an additional backup to the Cloud. When this system first came into planning, it was designed to be the central backup for all WCPS data.

After the April 29th outage occurred, other servers were able to be restored quickly, like Food Services and Transportation. This information had already been switched to the new backup system, which is a partnership with Innovative, Inc. of Hagerstown. The new backup system was selected through a competitive bid process and was noted for its ability to give WCPS additional control over the backup, the system’s proven reliability, and its exceptional data recovery and monitoring capabilities.

WCPS takes seriously the preservation of student grades and school information. Corrective actions have already been taken, and WCPS servers are currently backing up to the new system. This measure will address the likelihood of a long-term outage in the future.

We will continue to provide you new information as we work through this process. Once again, your patience and understanding are greatly appreciated.