Poway School District

About Your District

School District: Poway Unified School District
Location: 13626 Twin Peaks Rd.
Total Student enrollment: 33,000
Total number of schools: 35

About Your IT Disaster Planning Experience

We store 6 month’s worth at a non-district facility. We could use servers and storage at the main district office or high schools in an emergency.  There is sufficient bandwidth between the district office, Sabre Springs, and the high schools to run servers from there in an emergency.
Food Services – We backup the servers to tape, monthly fulls with incrementals  daily.  We store 6 month’s worth at a non-district facility.  Although the bandwidth isn’t sufficient to run applications at the Food Service facility using servers at the district office, the Food Service employees can come to the district in an emergency.

What disaster did your district experience? (50 word max.)

We have had wildfires twice in the last three years that shut down our district for a week each time. The second incident required us to move our district offices and therefore we had to set up a temporary tech center to allow for seamless communications between staff as well as for our parents, students and greater community.

When disaster struck, what were the results? (100 word max.)

We communicated through our phone notification system to over 40,000 homes and sent over 270,000 messages. Our website remained up and functioning while many governmental websites were crashing. Our parents were able to keep up on the latest developments and school information. A few of our teachers and students were able to continue their learning through our content management system. We were able to move critical servers quickly and managed to keep our network function with virtually no downtime.