This school year Skyward has been down frequently, causing problems for students and teachers.

The district platform for the website that teachers use to enter and calculate students’ grades crashes periodically, and has made it impossible for many teachers to keep gradebooks updated.

“It seems like it always goes down right when we’re trying to figure out grades for the end of the nine weeks,” math department chair Pamela Fangohr said. “A lot of us take homework home on the weekends and we don’t really get any information as to when updates [are] going on.”

Over winter break, the Jan. 5 deadline for entering final grades in the district had to be extended because the Skyward website was down.

The issue can be attributed to several causes, district senior network analyst Ron Fowler said. One of the issues was a new update in the Skyward system.

“Skyward had us consolidate our web server and database server into a single server over the break, as they felt it would improve performance,” he said “When they made that change, they updated the Skyward software to a new version.”

The district is unable to interfere with the updates. Skyward engineers are taking over as they try to bring the server and database together.

“Until they can resolve the issue it will continue to have problems,” Fowler said. “They’ve attempted multiple changes to the system to attempt to resolve the issue.”