District says missing PowerSchool data located; forensic review to follow

The Whitko Community School Corp. board heard an update April 15 that OnTrack, a forensic IT vendor, has located the district’s missing PowerSchool files from a March 17 server crash and the data will be extracted and reloaded into district systems.

Superintendent Povarnik told the board the vendor “has located and identified our PowerSchool data,” adding the files will be transferred to a dedicated hard drive and then uploaded back into PowerSchool so teachers can recover grades, attendance records, special-education reports and other records that were lost when the server failed.

Director of Technology Jason Klein said the server used to collect the recovered files is hosted on district systems and that “none of our information, none of our data is actually leaving the corporation.” He also said the district has installed power-backup and line-stabilizing equipment to reduce the chance of a similar failure.

Povarnik said the district will allow teachers time to enter grades and assignments once the data is restored, and that Winona IT— the district’s contracted IT provider—will perform a deep discovery of drives and servers to determine the root cause and recommend upgrades to prevent recurrence. “They’ll be making recommendations on updates and upgrades to make sure that this never happens again,” he said.

When a parent, Joyce Cripe, asked whether the district would consider a cloud-hosted PowerSchool solution, Povarnik said the option has been discussed with Winona IT and that the district will make a determination after the audit is complete.

The board’s next steps are administrative: complete data extraction, reload to the district server, allow staff time to re-enter any missing entries and receive Winona IT’s audit and recommendations. No formal vote was required on the update.