PSUSD phone lines restored after service issues
Phone problems could plague the first day of school for a major Coachella Valley school district. The vast majority schools in the Palm Springs Unified School District were unable to send and receive land line phone calls.
The problem was fixed just after 9:00 p.m. on Tuesday.
The district office and Agua Caliente Elementary School were not impacted by the outage.
“We started getting emails from sites and calls from teachers cellphones saying we don’t have phone service. At first we thought is was just a couple of schools and low and behold in 20 minutes, it’s not just a couple it’s everybody,” said Joan Boiko, communications director of PSUSD.
The first day of school for PSUSD students is Wednesday Aug 10. The first day of school is one of the busiest days for receptionists at PSUSD schools, with concerned parents calling with questions.
Members of the PSUSD IT department have been in contact with a person with Verizon Business. According to that person, there was a fiber optic line cut in the Los Angeles area that impacted thousands of customers, including the vast majority of PSUSD. Then a new problem arose. Members of the district didn’t know who to call for updates on progress for the repairs.
Verizon had been taken over by Frontier Communications in our area months ago.
KESQ contacted Frontier. Representatives gave us a number for someone with Verizon Business to call. That person was in New Jersey was not aware of any problems in our area, but they said they would look into it. With the time difference they weren’t able to get any information.
Parents with kids that go to a school in PSUSD with questions can email the principal of the school using the first initial and last name of the principal followed by @psusd.us. For example, if the principal’s name is John Smith the email would be jsmith@psusd.com.
If the phone lines go down on Wednesday morning parents can call the district office at 760-416-6000.
