MIAMI (WSVN) - The first day of virtual schooling for Miami-Dade County started off with some problems accessing the virtual system.
On Monday morning, some students and teachers expressed frustration after having problems connecting online.
Issues ranged from slowdowns to not being able to get onto the website as well as the website crashing and timing out.
Some students were able to get into their virtual classrooms, but their teachers were locked out.
7News spoke with a second grader who described how his first day back to school went.
When asked what he experienced, Joshua Guzman replied, “I couldn’t get on. It loads, but when I press it, like a bunch of times, it came to the same page that doesn’t work.”
The district cited external connectivity issues with the third party that runs distance-learning the platform.
Guzman and his father were eventually able to get to the login page, but once they clicked the sign-in button, the website crashed.
“The site crashing down, it’s going to be very difficult, especially if they have any type of Zoom meetings,” said Mario Guzman. “The connectivity is not going to be there.”
Miami-Dade County Schools held a news conference where they called the first day of school a disappointment because of the connectivity issues.
“As we anticipated, students and teachers started logging on, and very early on in the morning, we realized there were latency issues,” chief academic officer Marie Izquierdo said. “What that means is that as I’m attempting to sign on and put in my credentials, I time out. I time out, and I can’t log on, so when we started looking at the root cause of that, we came to this switch that Mr. Carvalho identified or described. The switch is like a gate, so the gate is, like, if someone knocks on your door and you say, ‘Excuse me, who is it?’ or you look through the peephole and you confirm that you know the person’s identity and you let them in. When you let them in, it’s called the portal. There was nothing wrong with our portal, but that switch that was checking to see if we knew who you were and were part of the M-DCPS family would not open the door. It just kept spinning itself.”
“I want to say, once again, that not only am I frustrated by this issue, I am disappointed,” Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, who visited nine schools, said. “I’m disappointed because our community deserves better, and our community, quite frankly, has learned to expect more.”
“We’re just asking everybody to be as patient as possible,” Karla Hernandez-Mats, president of United Teachers of Dade, said. “We know that the district is trying to figure out how to work through this, but it certainly leaves a lot of questions for us as educators.”
“And I want to express to every single teacher, professional, principal, student and parent that we really regret the difficulties that our school system and community faced today, and we are working diligently to fix them,” Carvalho said.
208,000 students were able to log into the virtual learning system, and more logged into Microsoft Teams.
Many teachers turned to alternative platforms such as Zoom or Microsoft Team to get their classes connected.
The district said they’re waiting for the third-party platform to fix the glitch.
Fourteen-year-old Camren Stuart, who attends Miami Norland Senior High, said he tried logging on 10 times starting at 8:30 a.m., and it didn’t work for him until 3:20 p.m., which is 10 minutes before the end of the school day.
“It’s kinda weird because the thing wasn’t working earlier today, so I just… I didn’t know what to do,” said the ninth-grader. “It said ‘Server offline’ or ‘Server error,’ something like that.”
His mom, Kessa Murray, said she hopes that the system will be fixed by Tuesday.
“Last year’s school, us as parents, we tried to adapt to the system, and last year it was very difficult and frustrating with the system, and now to start off with the first day repeating its cycle, it’s very frustrating,” she said.
Miami-Dade County Public Schools released a statement saying, in part:
“Today, during the first day of distance learning, many Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS) students and teachers experienced connectivity issues that impeded their ability to successfully connect to their online lessons. M-DCPS has been working tirelessly throughout the day, in collaboration with our network solutions company Cisco Systems, to identify the problem and offer a solution. Following several meetings with high-level executives from the company, the District has been provided assurances that the connectivity problems experienced by students and teachers have been identified and resolved. However, in an abundance of caution, we have created a redundant access solution that should allow students and teachers to access the K12 platform on Tuesday. Parents, students and teachers are being provided with specific login instructions. We ask for continued patience during this process.”
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