In September, students in Midlothian ISD experienced an unexpected shutdown to student email accounts due to an investigation that broke out after an alleged spam email was sent out by a student. This shutdown of the student emails caused problems between staff and students.
Megan Ross, AP Government and English teacher, elaborated on how the student email shutdown is affecting her communication with students.
“It’s been hard to communicate with students,” Ross said. “They can communicate with me through Canvas, but it’s nice to be able to shoot an email if you need to find somebody rather than relying on Remind but it’s harder when I can’t email students.”
This issue has not only affected staff members, but the student body as well. For one student, Nathan Barth (12), a misunderstanding led to a problem he had to work around.
“I was about to email one of my teachers because I got marked tardy even though I wasn’t tardy,” Barth said. “I wanted to email her about that and I couldn’t so I ended up having to wait until the next day to talk to her in class.”
Noah Buckner (11) also suggests that the shutdown of the school email accounts has made school life more stressful.
“It’s definitely stressful,” Buckner said “The first couple of weeks it wasn’t even working and no one knew what was going on.Through the first month it’s been like on and off. [For] some people it’s working and some people it’s not. It’s very difficult for us to communicate with students, teachers, or anybody.”
Barth also explains how the email shutdown has affected his communication with teachers.
“I can’t really communicate with my teachers because outlook is really the only thing I use to talk to them outside of class,” Barth said.
In addition, Buckner also makes a point to talk about how the communication about the matter could’ve been improved upon.
“I think it’s definitely communication for the most part,” Buckner said. “I think if it really comes down to switching back to Google I think they should because our computers are made for Google anyways. We shouldn’t use Microsoft if we’re having these issues.”
Ricardo Perez (11) elaborated on if it was a good idea to shutdown outlook to further investigate the situation at hand.
“I feel like the investigation is necessary,” Perez said. “You never know what emails people will send to each other, it could be spam or just anything. [You] can’t take the risk of one computer getting affected, and everything else shut down”.
As of October 9th, Student Outlook accounts are back up and running and students can properly communicate to teachers through email.