A power outage on Sunday night forced the Millburn Public School district to postpone its PARCC testing to Wednesday.
According to a letter from Interim Superintendent Christine Burton, the district-wide outage knocked down all internet connectivity, leading to the delay of testing for elementary and middle school students that was supposed to take place Monday.
Read the entire letter here:
As you are aware, we had an Internet outage district wide today that forced us to postpone today’s PARCC testing at the elementary and middle schools. All testing schedules are pushed back to Wednesday. There is no PARCC testing scheduled for tomorrow since it is an early dismissal day for staff development.
What happened? A power outage on Sunday night caused the air conditioner that cools the server room to fail. The server room overheated and therefore shut down all of our connectivity. Our technology department worked through the day to get us reconnected and we are back in business as of late this afternoon.
Is there a backup system? Yes. We are determining why the back up systems failed to alert us. We are working with personnel from the district’s Technology and Buildings and Grounds departments to ensure that we have all the fail-safe measures in place to prevent a similar situation from happening again.
PARCC testing will begin again on Wednesday. Assessments will continue for grade 5 and we will begin testing grade 8. Grade 4 will begin testing on Friday. See the updated calendar on the district’s PARCC website: https://sites.google.com/a/millburn.org/parcc-site/
Thanks to our staff and our students for their incredible flexibility today and ability to make learning happen under any circumstances. Thanks to parents for your patience and understanding. This was a learning opportunity for all of us.
Dr. Christine Burton
Interim Superintendent of Schools
