New York City public schools are exploring the possibility of staggering class start times to avoid a repeat of the widespread technical problems students experienced on a remote learning day during a snowstorm last month, local education officials said Wednesday.
“If we have a remote learning day tomorrow, we should be working to stagger start times, which we agree is not ideal from a student and staff perspective,” Emma Vadehra, the city Department of Education’s chief operating officer, testified at a City Council hearing on the Feb. 13 fiasco.
Many students encountered error messages when trying to log into remote learning that morning, after Mayor Eric Adams’ administration ordered schools closed due to the weather. Families said their children struggled with using school-issued technology, including Google Classroom, Chromebooks and Zoom, well into the school day.
The education department later apologized for the issues, which it said were caused by the surge in login attempts. They said the system’s user authentication services — provided by contractor IBM — could not handle the sheer volume of requests.
“The root cause of the issue was [that] the number of New York City public schools users logging in prior to 8 a.m. to start the remote learning day exceeded the capacity of the system to handle that peak load,” Scott Strickland, a deputy chief information officer at the department, told councilmembers on Wednesday.
Strickland also said the system would undergo automated performance tests to suss out any potential glitches before they happen.
But officials with IBM argued that the company was not at fault for the problems that arose last month. They said IBM has long been upgrading its system for the city’s public schools so that it can handle user traffic above the levels specified in its contract.
“On Feb. 13, the Department of Education had a closet door when it needed a barn door,” said Vanessa Hunt, an IBM senior state executive for…
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