By Kyle Roberts
One of the effects of yesterday’s city-wide has been the need to push out LEAP testing for Ruston High and Ruston Junior High students.
City officials said Thursday that the hope is that all city fiber is restored by Monday morning.
“We were on our third day of testing this week,” Ruston High School principal Dan Gressett said. “We are finishing up Algebra I and Geometry; what we will do is move the rest to (this morning). If we still don’t have internet, we will push to probably Tuesday (May 2) of next week.
“We do not have any other testing going on at Ruston High outside of AP next week; we’ve dealt with this kind of thing before, so we have a good plan in place.”
Lincoln Parish Superintendent Ricky Durrett confirmed that there will be no disruption to any other schools in the parish aside from Ruston’s junior high and high school.
“Outside of those two schools, we will continue testing as normal,” Durrett said.
Gressett discovered the outage Thursday morning when arriving at school and talked with the testing coordinator, who reported the outage to him. The internet being down also affects the phone system, which means that incoming calls are being directed to the school board office during the meantime.
There is, however, no disruption to a normal school day.
“We’re having a school day,” Gressett confirmed. “We’ll be just fine.”
Ruston High and other parish schools faced similar circumstances in 2019 during testing when an EF-3 tornado tore through the city overnight and caused outages for multiple days in a row.
