Sage rat takes down communications

A rodent with a taste for photons took down the Internet and phone lines at Sisters Middle School and Sisters High School last week.

A sage rat chewed through a fiber optic cable at Sisters Middle School, leaving both technology-dependent schools with no phones, no e-mail and no Internet capability from Monday through Wednesday.

"Communication with the outside, obviously, was severely hampered," High School Principal Bob Macauley said. "Research by our students was severely hampered."

Some classes are totally dependent on online technology.

"We have four classes that are about paperless in their classroom," Macauley said.

Students submit their work electronically to a "digital locker," where teachers access the work and correct it and students in turn retrieve the work. None of that worked in the outage.

While only a small percentage of classes are that reliant on the Internet, many, if not most, classes use the Internet for research. And the dependency will grow in coming years.

"We're trying to move away from paper and do more electronic submission," Macauley said.

At the middle school, the academic impact was not much felt, since students are less Web-dependent.

"Students weren't much fazed by it," said Principal Kathy Miner. "Instruction still went on in our classrooms. They just did pencil-and-paper projects."

Loss of easy communication with parents was the biggest challenge.

"The biggest impact (was) just not being able to receive phone calls from parents about after-school transportation arrangements," Miner said. "We could see the calls adding up on the voicemail, but we couldn't access them."

For both schools, the biggest impact was in the ability to communicate among staff, who are used to using e-mail.

"It kind of slowed us down and put us back in the mode of 8-12 years ago," Macauley said.

Author Bio

Jim Cornelius, Editor in Chief

Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.

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