Cascade School District email down nearly two weeks

Email at the Cascade School District was down for nearly two weeks. It was finally restored on May 9. The whole scenario was problematic for the district, which like many other public agencies and private businesses, rely heavily on email.
“It is an outside of the district issue. It’s a Microsoft Outlook problem. From what we’ve been told, they’ve upgraded some software and some equipment. Wherever they store our stuff in the cloud, where we really don’t know where that is,” said Cascade School Superintendent Bill Motsenbocker.
When Microsoft upgraded their software and hardware, it dropped all the email accounts for the school district, at the cascadesd.org account. The outage for Outlook and Hotmail apparently affected other entities as well.
Motsenbocker said the fix took much longer than anticipated. He said it affects everything they do at the district- communicating with Olympia, Educational Service District, parents. It’s been pretty challenging, to say the least.
“We really haven’t been able to get around it. That’s the problem. Some of the things we do by email like posting open job positions, we’ve done everything by paper, which is kind of the old method, posting it in buildings and everywhere we can think to do that,” Motsenbocker said. “In some cases, we’ve done some mailings. We’ve tried to communicate the problem with our email through our website.”
There is a system through the district website where they can notify people by email, phone or text, like they do for a school closure, due to weather. They used that system, but it is very limited because messages can only be so long.
“So we’ve done some of that, just to keep our parents informed. If you get an email that bounces back, this is the reason why, because we’re having a problem with our Outlook system,” he said.
The district did not receive many calls about it, he said. For Motsenbocker, he’s never seen anything like this happen before.
 “This is unprecedented in any time in my 37 years of public eduction. This is the longest I’ve ever seen anything like this happen,” Motsenbocker said.
As you might imagine, they are going to reevaluate using Outlook for the email.
“We’re having a meeting with some of the folks with the ESD. If we try to shift to a different service, then migrate all our emails over, which would take awhile...is that going to be the best method as far as timeline goes,” he said. “If push ourselves out another week if we change services, we might not do that. This has never happened before. It’s not a problem we experience all the time.”
Frustrations were running high during the outage.
“Our hands of are tied. It has nothing to do with our email system or the ESD. It’s all in Microsoft’s domain and they are trying to figure it out,” Motsenbocker said.
Ian Dunn can be reached at 548-5286 or editor@leavenworthecho.com.