As Southeastern Louisiana University continues to struggle with ongoing trouble with its computer network, the effect has been far-reaching. While SLU students and faculty deal with a system-wide computer outage,  Riverside Academy students and teachers who participate in several dual enrollment classes have been struggling as well.

High school students in dual enrollment classes have been locked out of their accounts and unable to email professors. Some students have been unable to access their work and even exams, which were scheduled for last week. That brought fears that students would be penalized for missed work. Teachers also have been struggling with no communication from the university and no work for their students. SLU officials have not addressed the cause of the campus-wide outage or what steps are being taken to restore it. The email system was working last week, but the rest of the campus network remains offline.

“It affected most of our classes,” said Sonya Mazzella, who teaches Dual Enrollment Speech. ” They can’t take quizzes, they can’t get to their assignments, and they can’t get to their professors. If you didn’t have everything ahead of time, you’re kind of stuck.”

“Everyone had to go back to old school textbook and paper,” said Donnell Becker, who teaches dual enrollment psychology and sociology. “They are so used to doing their work online.  Also, tests and quizzes have not been accessible online, so this has been somewhat of an obstacle – nothing that can’t be figured out, but just a pain in the butt!”

Teacher Amy Dimaggio said the outage left her English 102 students scrambling.

“The … outage left DE English 102 without the usual way to submit writing assignments such as their midterm, which was the first day of the outage,” Dimaggio said. “It has not allowed these students to use the SELU Library for research, which is a requirement of the course.  We have had to communicate with our professor via email instead of the usual Moodle platform.”