On September 21st and 22nd, the Eagan High School website malfunctioned. This happened on a parent night, where parents met up with their students’ teachers, and made it difficult for teachers to show parents their websites while also inconveniencing the students who needed access to the website.

The website was down for about 28 hours, making it the longest that it was inaccessible in the past twenty years. Ms. Anderson, the website administrator, explains, “We have had approximately five incidents in twenty years that the site was inaccessible. Those times were at most thirty to forty minutes.” Previously the website has also had “slowdowns;” times when it is slow, but not out.

EHS, Dakota Hills Middle School, and Black Hawk Middle School all use rSchooltoday (the software for the website), but not the same server. About ten other schools across the nation that use the same server as EHS faced the same issues on the 21st and 22nd. The server went down, and the back-up servers that are meant to support the system when it fails also didn’t respond.

Developers at rSchooltoday eventually fixed the website malfunction. Now the website has three backups to prevent this situation from happening again. “Plus the fact that it happened once in twenty years is a pretty good record,” adds Ms. Anderson. The site’s software has been used since 1998, when Eagan’s web coordinators and developers worked together for eighteen months to create the template that over 400 schools use today.

“We average about 750,000 hits a month, with over 600 separate subsites that are maintained by teachers, staff, and parents,” states Ms. Anderson. Since the malfunction, the website has been running smoothly and will hopefully remain that way.