MONROE — School District of Monroe Superintendent Joe Monroe said that district operations are making their way back online following a security disturbance that forced the internet and phone systems offline two weeks ago.

He updated the Board of Education at their meeting on Monday, Sept. 21, which had been pushed back a week.

“Obviously the district experienced network challenges that required some attention and specialized support,” Supt. Monroe said. “We secured that. We’re happy to say that a lot of progress has been made towards working on some of the challenges that we’ve experienced.”

Supt. Monroe said that as of Monday, the district had seen a number of operations come back online.

“We’ll continue to work on that in order to make sure that all of our operations are where they need to be going forward,” Supt. Monroe said.

ACT testing prep was pushed back more than a week due to the outage, as students and staff need reliable internet for test preparations.

Monroe senior Lian Truong, student liaison to the school board, told the board how she was affected by the event.

“I’m in a sociology class that’s through Blackhawk (Technical College), and a lot of the students in there, we were struggling last week — especially when it was only in specific areas of the school where they had internet. We had to drive to the library to get some internet,” Truong said. “A lot of the classes are wondering how — if this would ever happen again — what would you do to prevent this?”

Supt. Monroe said that there’s a significant amount of planning and discussion that went into how the district would respond.

“Our priority was making sure that our buildings were safe and operational. Just know that if we were to bring in some things, there would be some costs. And we’d try to balance that as appropriately as we could,” he said.

Monroe was not the only school district experiencing a potential data breach. On Sept. 1, Springfield, Mass. also experienced similar disturbances. That school district shut out classes altogether for a few days.

According to New England Public Media, an organized criminal group managed to hack into the school district computer system.

According to a report by WWLP in Springfield, the compromised information includes names, addresses and dates of birth, as well as medical notes, phone records, and student conduct records. The attackers also stole racial and ethnic information, lesson plans, and test scores.

Homecoming Parade to stay the same this year

Monroe High School Principal Jeriamy Jackson said the plan for this year’s Homecoming Parade on Friday, Oct. 3 will be to use the same route the city is used to. Students will leave the Old MHS parking lot at 2 p.m. and head north to the Square before circling back.

Jackson said the discussion about the parade rout began more than a year and a half ago. The distance from the new high school to downtown is about 1/2 of a mile further than the previous route.

Jackson said the MHS prep rally will conclude at about 1:15 p.m., which will give students and staff plenty of time to get across town to the old school, which last held classes back in early June.