It's a big problem in schools, in general. Schools have basically no budget for IT. As a substitute teacher, I'm regularly deadnaming students because attendance lists can only be printed with LegalName. It sucks.

But I also dabble on the tech side of the education sector, and it's embarrassing how far behind student information systems are, in general:

• No API access to anything, so everything is done by .CSV file.
• No databases, nor training in how to use them, so massive student datasets are emailed around in spreadsheets.
• Teachers leave their systems logged in with access to the entire district's networked drives system.
• Districts are running everything on prod with no backups.

I could go on.

But schools are never given the budget to hire experts to do these things right, nor the budget to get the hardware they need for robust testing environments and backups.

This sounds like it could have been this contractor deploying without sufficient testing, but it could just as easily be the province's contractor changing the student data portal and breaking everything.