There is an entire department at fault here and, speaking from first-hand experience, some of the individuals that have been there for years and are STILL there are not competent to do their jobs. Why have these people not been removed long ago? There had to be things not getting done for some time for us to have gotten hit this hard.

Do we even know if the IT dept. is being given what they need to accomplish this task, or perhaps even the tools that were needed to prevent it?

I find it hard to believe the NEW department head was the one in charge of installing anti-virus and whatever other safeguards are involved to make sure that this does not happen. Certainly he should have been making sure these things were happening, but I think that there is more than one individual to blame here.

I am not sure what to think of Bunton considering he has been here much longer and overseen this department without firing the incompetent people I have had TRY to address my issues time and time again!

I think all comments that compare the Janesville School District to a "normal business" are naive. Try a bureaucracy! A few of the people I have worked with in the IT dept. would never have lasted in a corporate/business environment. I have actually had a better experience working with the new tech and IT head than I had in recent years. I thought the tide was turning...perhaps this major situation will cause it to!

This is what happens when you don't pay enough for good IT personnel. What did we do before we had computers? Very simple solutin to this problem. Get a clean computer and then use that to uninstall all the other computers and then reinstall all the uninfected software. Why are they still fighting a virus that should have been wiped out on all pc's to start with?

Wow, I don't know the factual details, but 3 weeks in anything is a long time. I don't believe they have "everyone" working on it. Like most said, if this situation happened to a normal business, 3 weeks would be unacceptable. Heck, 3 hours would be.

We can have a person on the moon in about 16 hours, but we can't solve a computer problem?

I wonder who is the software company? Are they assisting in the fix? We are a results driven society, and what results are happening here?

Maybe if the district paid techs better, they could hire employees with experience and knowledge who know what they are doing.

The Janesville School District should consider hosting some of their computer network infrastructure at a dedicated data center with co-location managed services. There are a few big ones in Madison they should look into. That way this problem doesn't happen again.

Hey, I just got on! WooHoo!!!

Well, I know I sure miss being able to monitor my daughter's work in school on family access. I was able to get on for a little while last week. Not so yesterday. I will try again here soon.

Also, we are REQUIRED by the SDJ to keep an electronic grade book. After all, this is 2008. Can you imagine your accounting department not being able to enter PO's or invoices for 3 weeks...maybe longer? Or even access client account information to collect on a past due payment? Ask your CFO to keep records without the computer. But, I'm not running a Fortune 500 company, just 5 classes of 147 students.

No, teachers haven't forgetten how to record grades without a computer. The district actually REQUIRES teachers to post grades electronically in this new age of technology. Each day they believe the system will be back up and running soon. After all, the system has been up and down throughout these three weeks, just like it's been since the beginning of second semester last year. When one believes it's just a short waiting game, it doesn't make sense to invest in converting everything to a manual gradebook, with all the work involved in that. Some teachers have over 200 students. Had they known how long it was going to take the district's tech team this time, I bet those gradebooks would be in place. "Whodathunk?"

About keeping a gradebook... I personally don't have time to do double the work. I'll enter the grades once, when I have time at home. This might take me a few days, but writing down 30+ grades/assignments for 147 students to re-enter in the computer 3 weeks from now is not an option for me.

So, teachers have forgotten how to keep grades without a computer??????

I missed this the first time I read the article: "Doug Bunton, business director for the district, said he had not heard that the computer problems were getting worse." He is the business DIRECTOR and he didn't know?!?! He should be all over this problem and he didn't know? Like I said in my previous posting, if he worked for a large investor owned company, the VP would have him walking out the door after 3 days and this has been 3 weeks plus.

Having vast knowledge of the Information Technology field parents and staff of the district should be extremely scared as the districts personal information files could have been compromised. If this was the case everything the district has ever typed into a computer could be at risk ex; bank account information, social security numbers and any other critical information could lead an attacker to compromise ones identity. You should begin to monitor your credit report and bank statements to look for suspicious activity as this is a very likely possibility.

I wish I felt comfortable enough to just lay everything out there that I know, but if I say too much, I fear being scolded for not being a forward thinker. We're not supposed to talk poorly of superiors or administrative management. (It's part of the Studer philosophy as well.) I do view Brandon (new IT manager) is severely incompetent. I hope the administration comes to that conclusion soon.

This is nepotism at it's finest as jtmek says. Gee, Any relationship to the nepotism that went on at city hall by chance?

The firewall program was changed this summer - could that be part of the problem?

I wonder if they were using McAfee the best crap you can buy .

I don't want to point any fingers because I'm not on the front line to truly know what is going on. However, I will say any Lead IT person worth their salt would have never let a network get in to this situation. And, as a previous poster commented, heads would be rolling in ANY larger company in this same situation. I am the support lead for a 3000+ employee company and if we had this problem for even 1 hour, my head would be on someone's desk. To say that one PC gets cleaned and then infects another one is laughable. To clean a virus you start at the server and work your way down. I would like to know the credentials of the persons working on this and why the school district would not be stepping in to find someone that knows what they are doing.

MikeF, my point is precisely that disaster planning is essential before the fact. After the fact, it's always suddenly very popular.
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If servers or workstations (which are different animals and should have different protections) are getting reinfected (which is only from comments, not sourced), something is seriously wrong with the procedures they are following now. I would actually begin being concerned at this point about insider interference. Sloppy firewall and AV practices could account for this, but this isn't the time to be sloppy.

There are 60 servers and 3500 workstations spread across 23 buildings. From the reports that I have heard, as soon as one machine is cleaned, it gets reinfected by another machine. This is network aware and spread. This makes it extremely difficult to fight this problem.
I remember a few years back there was a pair of viruses that were fighting for control of the desktop. Each would uninstall the other and open a new backdoor. Some days there were 2 or more variations of each released. All the anti-virus companies were struggling to keep up with the new strains. This went on for several weeks. Eventially, the AV companies were able to get ahead and won out, but it was quite a challenge in the IT tech support industry for a while.
Having worked through that, I completely understand the frustration the school district techs are experiencing. They are trying to keep as many services available while simultaneously fighting this problem. Perhaps they need to take the approach that UW-Madison took a few years back when they had a network storm caused by a virus. They took every building offline and reconnected them one at a time after the building was certified clean. It will be extremely disruptive and inconvienence everyone, but it should take care of the problem.
As for the users, I do not understand why there are "piles of students' papers on their desks because they can't enter the grades in the computerized grade book". How about using a piece of paper and pen to record the grades for entry later? That is the way it was done before there were computers.
And for all the armchair network techs out there, yes a disaster recovery or business continuity plan with hot swap servers would have helped with this, but complaining now and pointing fingers will not fix the problem. I am sure that after the mess is cleaned up, there will be serious discussion on how to prevent this from happening again.

The cost is minimal in comparison the loss of efficiency that our teachers have been facing the last three weeks. Computer memory is cheap.

It would be nice to do all this prevention and have backup servers etc.. but guess what I assume that costs money. People are complaining all the time about taxes etc... how is the school district supposed to pay for it?

Janesvillean is 100% correct. Proper planning and disaster recovery techniques would have a system many times larger than the school district up in 24 hours. I fear that if they are still trying to fix it this far out the data may be irrecoverable.

The obvious reality is that this “virus” situation has tapped the IT department’s ability to fix the problem. If this happened and we were a department store that was losing thousands of dollars every minute the website were down, we would be out of business, so I don’t believe that the problem should take this long to fix! I think IT should just admit that the problem has gotten too big for them to handle, so that the district can begin looking for new solutions. Some of the most basic things that I have been unable to do at school include taking attendance, checking phone messages, calling parents, updating and maintaining grades, handing back assignments (because grades can’t been recorded), accessing files that I have used in the past to supplement the textbook’s weak grammatical spots, creating and saving new files, accessing the internet to find material to replace the files that have been locked up by the virus (the IT department has increased the sites that it has blocked from school). Essentially, the computer is mostly a decorative piece in our office. We have discussed covering it with a colorful fabric and using it as a stand for a nice vase with flowers. I am glad that a teacher contacted the newspaper because the community needs to be aware that our schools don’t have the tools that teachers and students in other districts have.

Chemical_6:
Really? The school board created the virus? Why is it that every thing that happens at a building or to a child is the school boards fault? The School board is to oversee finance, hire/fire the superintendent and set policy - true, some may micromanage more than others, but the school board and legislators didn't cause the virus. I do agree however that the school board needs to pressure the administration further to secure the district network and improve technological communication...you could contact your school board to encourage that be done. I'm not sure if they know that this has been so difficult for the staff in these schools, but I hope the teaching staff believes enough in their school board that they'd go there before the newspaper. Blame and finger pointing aside, we need to ensure that these resources are available very soon. Just my humble opinion.

Some little man is way over his head!

I've worked in IT in global, Fortune 100 companies, and none of them could afford downtime of this magnitude. They'd go out of business!
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The key to disaster recovery is disaster planning. Are you backing up? How often? Are you TESTING your backups? Do you have "hot swap" servers on hand? Can your staff fully wipe a drive, fully reinstall your operating system on your server, and restore your data in 24 hours or less? True, some of that costs money, and nobody has the time to worry about something that hasn't happened yet. But when you don't plan, this is what you get.
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As I say, I have nuts and bolts experience in this field. This is not a matter of how dedicated the staff or hired guns are working to get things back up. This is a matter of poor planning.
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I hope a thorough review is undertaken so that it doesn't happen again. That means a comprehensive disaster plan reviewed by IT and administrative staff and any other stakeholders.
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The schools also need to firewall their servers properly so that a virus can't migrate from student or teacher computers onto the network.

if someone like the school district can be hit this hard with a virus on their computer what hope is there for the rest of us????

Roadmaster - you may not know that persons qualifications, so I find that an unjust statement. This problem is apparently bigger than just the virus that struck the schools (which has nothing to do with administration). It is not the administration that caused the virus or the construction, it was the school board and the legislation. I hope that the teachers are able to work comfortably again very soon. . .

This is complete incompetence on the part of our new head of IT department. We had few, if any problems when the former IT person was working. Any chance he'll come out of retirement?? Neoptism should not be a factor in hiring your top IT person.

As for Doug Bunton thinking the problems haven't gotten worse, well, his head must be buried somewhere because they are much worse. In some schools, teachers can't enter grades, they can't enter attendance. Many staff members have no access to all their files, data, etc. The longer this problem persists, the worse it gets.

This problem is negatively affecting our students and it is truly unacceptable.

I urge all parents to find out if their students grades and attendance are up to date and if not, contact the superintendant or even the newspaper. This needs to be fixed NOW!

Maybe if the District hadn't hired an administrator's son to head up the IT department this problem would have become so serious.