Some Big Apple students and their put-upon parents struggled to sign in to school on Monday as the district pivoted to a glitch-filled remote learning session instead of a traditional snow day.
Kids and parents who used the web browser Google Chrome to try to get on the Zoom classroom replacement in the morning were met with frustrating error messages, blocking them from signing in.
Others couldn’t get on because their schools had sent the students home with Chromebooks to use in virtual learning scenarios.
“We were scrambling to make it work,” one parent complained.
“These issues should have been worked out by now. Luckily, we were fortunate to have a personal device we used to log in since the school-provided Chromebook wasn’t connecting.”
Roughly 400,000 students logged into the remote learning day on Monday morning, according to Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
That left about one-fifth of the students absent, with the administration saying about a half million kids were scheduled to attend the remote learning day.
Another parent, who had bemoaned trying to get young kids to sit for a hours-long Zoom session, said it was “pretty much what I expected.”
“Hiccups, but overall I wouldn’t call it a failure,” they said. “The fourth grader [was] read a list of 15 rules that I myself don’t hold myself to in Zoom meetings. No eating? No turning camera off? Insanity.”
Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels praised the digital pivot as a success, failing to mention the kids having issues getting into their virtual classrooms.
“Students were able to log into their virtual class classroom quickly and get right into their school day,” Samuels said.
“It was a smooth start to the day,” the school’s leader said from the Blue Room in City Hall.
The issues arose on Monday, even with nearly half the students not expected to be in class, with older kids already having a planned day off for teacher in-sessions.
