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Credit...Jae C. Hong/Associated Press
New York Times
Website Crashes and Cyberattacks Welcome Students Back to School
With many districts across the country opting for online learning, a range of technical issues marred the first day of classes.
By Dan Levin and Kate Taylor
Sept. 8, 2020
A ransomware attack forced Hartford, Conn., to call off the first day
of classes. A website crash left many of Houston’s 200,000 students
staring at error messages. And a server problem in Virginia Beach
disrupted the first hours back to school there.
For millions of American schoolchildren, the Tuesday after Labor Day
traditionally marks the end of summer vacation and the start of the
first day of classes. But this year, instead of boarding buses and
lugging backpacks, many students opened their laptops for online
instruction at home, only to encounter technical glitches.
For Jessica Rios, the problems for her four children in Houston schools
started early. Following a video conference with their teacher on
Tuesday morning, her second-grade son and his classmates were supposed
to log into the district’s online learning hub. Quickly, the children
started unmuting themselves to complain, Ms. Rios said.
“All of them in the class were like, ‘It’s not loading,’ ‘It’s showing
an error,’ ‘It’s saying unavailable,’” she said. Then her three other
children encountered problems, too.
“The district had five months, which I feel was ample enough time for
them to be able to work at least the major kinks out,” Ms. Rios said.
In a news conference, the district’s interim superintendent, Grenita
Lathan, acknowledged the problem and asked for patience.
Districts that returned before Labor Day have faced similar issues. In
Philadelphia, students had trouble logging on last week because of a
server issue. North Carolina schools encountered a statewide software
problem on the first day back last month. And some families in Seattle,
which had a sort of trial run for school on Friday, said they were
kicked out of class calls or had difficulty connecting to text chats
and camera feeds.
“A lot of districts are just wildly unprepared for online learning,”
Morgan Polikoff, a professor of education at the University of Southern
California, said. “Not because they’re incompetent or aren’t trying;
they just don’t have the expertise to do this.”
He said some of the technical issues stemmed from a lack of sufficient
preparation for online learning over the summer, when many districts
were still focused on opening in person — until surging coronavirus
cases in much of the country and concern by parents and teachers forced
many to reverse course.
But those issues, he said, are merely a symptom of a larger problem
faced by the nation’s 13,000 school districts: a lack of guidance from
state and federal education officials. Rather than receiving
recommendations for best practices and coordinated purchasing plans,
districts large and small were largely left on their own while tackling
the huge challenge of finding virtual learning platforms and signing
contracts within a few months.
“It’s just way too much to even think about as a district leader,” Dr.
Polikoff said. “You’ve got to figure all these things out for yourself.”
Tuesday was the first day of school in some of the nation’s largest
districts, including Chicago, Dallas and Baltimore, along with many
suburbs of Washington, all of which started remotely. Most had
originally planned to offer at least a mix of in-person and remote
classes, but rising virus caseloads, pressure from teachers’ unions and
concern from parents and health officials forced many to make the
switch to remote-only instruction.
Some districts, including many in Texas, still plan to open classrooms
several weeks from now if virus caseloads decline in their communities
and if buildings can be prepared for students. But in New Jersey, where
officials had planned earlier in the summer to offer in-person
instruction starting this week, many districts instead have decided to
remain online only, citing teacher shortages, ventilation issues and
delayed guidance from the state.
In New York City, the nation’s largest district, teachers and staff
members reported to work on Tuesday, but the city’s 1.1 million
students will not arrive until Sept. 21 — 10 days later than initially
planned. Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the shift a week ago after many
educators said classrooms would not be ready to reopen this week.
In other parts of the country, including several states in the South
and the Midwest, schools have been open for more than a month,
resulting in student quarantines and temporary shutdowns in some
districts where classes are being held in person. A district in
Cherokee County, Ga., had to order more than 1,200 people to quarantine
and close down two high schools after just more than a week of classes.
Other districts seem to have reopened without major outbreaks, although reporting is uneven, making cases difficult to track.
In places that have opted for online classes, remote learning has
continued to be a major challenge, as it was in the spring when
widespread absenteeism, lack of technology, poor broadband connections
and other challenges led to growing student achievement gaps by race
and income. Glitches and sabotage have only added to those frustrations.
In Virginia Beach, when students and teachers tried logging in for
their first day of classes on Tuesday, they were blocked by an issue
with the cloud-based web filter that the district uses to monitor
students’ online activity. Service was restored before noon, according
to a district spokeswoman, who said other districts on the East Coast
had similar problems with the filter provider.
School Reopenings... Back to School
Updated Sept. 8, 2020
The latest on how schools are reopening amid the pandemic.
The first day of school was a rocky one in many places, as districts
that started classes online dealt with technical glitches, crashing
websites and cyberattacks.
It’s not easy to get a coronavirus test for a child. As schools reopen,
many parents still can’t find one nearby, impeding the fight against
the pandemic.
Life in a quarantine dorm: Colleges are trying to isolate students who
have been exposed to the virus, but they are running into a host of
problems.
Penn State football defines fall in State College, Pa. What is the town without it?
Aaron Spence, the Virginia Beach superintendent, said technical
difficulties should be seen in the context of the unprecedented task
facing schools that had to prepare for the option of both online and
in-person learning.
“We’ve had to build two school systems from the ground up,” he said — a
task that included building out wireless infrastructure for tens of
thousands of students, developing a virtual learning system, training
5,500 teachers and providing technical support staff and resources, all
within a matter of months.
“We are rising to that challenge,” he said, “but it has been a heavy lift.”
In some districts, that challenge has been compounded by deliberate
attacks. Last week, online classes in Miami-Dade County, the nation’s
fourth-largest district, were choked by glitches for days. A
16-year-old student at South Miami Senior High School was arrested on
Thursday in connection with cyberattacks that contributed to those
issues.
In Hartford, the district had spent many weeks preparing for a mix of
online and in-person classes. But over the weekend, officials found
that cyberattackers had targeted some 200 of the city’s servers with
ransomware — including the one that manages school bus routes. The
district was forced to delay the first day of school, leaving nearly
18,000 students in limbo.
“We had a very unusual summer with everything we had to do to get ready
to go back,” John Fergus, a spokesman for the district, said, adding,
“This is not something I thought we’d be dealing with on the first day.”
Ally Fonte said her two sons’ teachers at North Beach Elementary School
in Miami-Dade County were able to adjust swiftly to glitches and
cyberattacks on the first day of school last week. “They had kind of
anticipated technical difficulties,” she said, “just not on this scale.”
But Ms. Fonte said the district’s remote instruction model was still “a
fiasco.” Both of her sons, who are in first and third grades, have
struggled to follow a maze of teacher schedules on multiple online
platforms. The technical issues have added to the difficulty, requiring
her to frequently help.
“It isn’t sustainable,” Ms. Fonte wrote in an email to the school
principal on Tuesday, adding in an interview, “I am at the point where
I will have to let them fail Spanish, P.E. and music, because I can’t
manage their two schedules full-time on top of my full-time job.”
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