Fife Schools Technology

The past week’s weather gave us many opportunities to use our automated call system. This also gave us the opportunity to answer some questions about the system.

Read the FAQs here: http://www.fifeschools.com/depts/tech/help/CallSystemFAQs.html

Here is a phone tip for staff using district phones. If something doesn’t seem right about your phone such as calls going straight to your voicemail without ringing, give this a try:

Press the pound key four times (i.e. ####). That will reset your phone to the default settings.

Sometimes a phone may accidentally be set to the ”do not disturb” or “forward” settings and you may not know it. Pressing the pound key four times is an easy potential fix before asking for more help.

Today we had a phone and network outage at Hedden. Phones, email, and Internet access were down and unfortunately it took longer than expected to bring services back.

What happened?

Qwest is currently having a contractor bury fiber optic cable along 8th Avenue to connect Hedden (along with others in that area). Due to the unfinished construction and the wet weather, it appears some existing circuits got wet and “shorted out”. Once Qwest isolated the problem, they were able to repair the connection.

We were able to use our new phone messaging system, SchoolMessenger, to notify all Hedden families about the problem in case parents needed to reach the school by phone. It’s a great system!

We apologize for anyone inconvenienced by this outage.  A big thank you to the Hedden staff for being good sports.

I’ll be talking more about our fiber optic installation in an upcoming post.