Some Bladen County parents and students reported issues with internet access and crashes during the first days of school this week. Monday, August 17, was the first day for Bladen County Schools’ students. Other charter and private schools in the area started their new school year before this week.
Bladen County Schools started with Plan C- remote learning for all students for the first four weeks of the new school year.
“It’s an adjustment, but we are trying to make it work,” one local public school mom said. “It’s frustrating when the internet crashes, but we hope things will smooth out soon.”
One local teacher is thinking positive. She stated, “Spectrum seems to be working just fine today. Honestly, so far virtual learning is going well in my class. We’re not doing synchronous learning, and I’m so excited about all the cool things we’re doing,” she added, “The internet folks are working hard to help the kids do school.”
Some local charter schools have also had to deal with technical issues during the first days of school. Internet outages and technical difficulties have caused extra concerns for local educators, students, and parents. However, the issues are not just local issues. The NCEdCloud technology used across the state for remote learning has malfunctioned, according to Mark Johnson, the North Carolina State Superintendent.
Today he released the following statement.
NCEdCloud is now functional, again, after another outage this morning.
Johnson stated, “It’s bad enough that so many students don’t have the option to attend school in-person, but malfunctions of the tool that so many schools use to access remote learning are simply unacceptable.
These are challenging times, and everyone is trying to extend more grace. That’s what Identity Automation, the vendor, got on Monday, the first time their remote learning tool went down.
Parents, educators, and students are all doing the best that we can and deserve technology that works. While we are limited in terms of what we can do immediately, rest assured the Department of Public Information will be having blunt discussions about these failures with the vendor and NC DIT in the days ahead.”
According to Johnson, the Department of Public Instruction selected Identity Automation after an RFP process in 2013.
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