The James Logan Courier

Compiled from Courier staff reports

Ongoing troubles with the New Haven School District’s relatively new email system, called Groupwise, resulted in email being unavailable Thursday morning, and frustratingly slow and unreliable when has been available.

Principal Don Montoya took to the James Logan public address system Thursday morning to tell his staff about the outage. He announced that the system was again available at about noon.
Earlier in the week, the Chris Hobbs, NHUSD’s person in charge of the email system, said in an email to the district’s staff explaining that a glitch in the system had resulted in the rapid filling of the district’s email server’s hard drive with ersatz emails which bounce back and forth between email users generating millions more copies of themselves.

“So far we have deleted over 1.2 million messages,” Hobbs wrote, “ but the process used to purge the message databases is very resource intensive (this is why you are experiencing the slowness). There are probably millions more - we have an expert working with us to resolve the issue once and for all.”

Maintenance last weekend was supposed to have taken care of the problem, but didn't. Montoya said a longer-than-expected maintenance procedure caused Thursday morning’s outage.

Patience among teachers regarding the email system appears to be wearing thin.

"It makes things inconvenient," said teacher Abigail Noche, "The new system is much harder to use."

"It rally affects my at home and at work," said Julie Curson. "The old system was better."

"I feel completely disconnected," said Tim Wharton. "The old one wasn't broken. I don't know why they tried to fix it."

Michael Foster called the email system "slow, unreliable, difficult to use."

Some teachers complained that the system is often inaccessible from home, particularly on weekends.

"It's really slow on weekends. I can rarely get on," said Kimberly Pettit.

Language Arts Department Chair Chris Ryan said the system's unreliability and other difficulties had resulted in some teachers opting not to read their school email at all, making communication among colleagues more difficult.

At least one teacher resorted to using the old email system, OpenMail, that the new system replaced. Even though teachers were told to stop using it at the end of the last school year, it still remains available on the district’s computer system.