KANSAS CITY, Mo. — School districts throughout the Kansas City metro were met with technical issues as many started the year remotely.
In Olathe, the district's system called "StudentVUE" was overloaded due to an "unexpected load of traffic," according to a district spokesperson, causing a period of interruption.
"Our system was designed to handle our entire student population of more than 30,000 users; however, we had over 160,000 attempts this morning," the district said in an email. "It would help tremendously if students are only logged on from one device and parents are not logged in at the same time."
The district told 41 Action News they conducted stress tests on the system prior to Tuesday and did not see any issues.
Alex Olmos, a parent in the Olathe School District, said his son encountered a couple problems.
"The site went down, we tried to get back on," he said. "Just trying to tell my son to be patient and eventually everything will start working."
Parents said the district did a good job communicating with parents, although the morning was stressful.
"This morning they were frustrated, they were all tears, they were really excited to get back to school and to learning," parent Melissa Barrios said. "When things started working right about 9 o'clock, they were all smiles."
The district sent an email to parents Tuesday afternoon, which said that by 10 a.m., about half of the student population had "successfully logged into the system."
"But that doesn’t excuse the challenges of the morning," the email stated. "Based on new recommendations from StudentVUE’s parent company, we have made several adjustments to the system to help alleviate issues going forward. Additionally, teachers will be setting up a backup Zoom link for each class that can be emailed to keep education running smoothly in the event we have any issues in the future."
The district has added additional servers "in addition to our already increased bandwidth," the spokesperson said.
The Raytown School District also encountered problems when students signed on Tuesday, but they were later resolved.
"I think the system was slow so a lot of the apps weren't running quite right," said Brian Huff, Raytown School District associate superintendent. "We did notice the slowness this morning, but now it seems to be running very nicely."
Its Internet filter provider, Securly, was having problems that kept high school students and staff from accessing the internet.
Securly, our Internet filter provider, is having issues in the U.S. today. Users on district Windows machines (high school students & staff) may not be able to access the Internet. Securly has identified the cause and is working to correct it. We will continue to keep you posted. pic.twitter.com/rkpjgOSEQH
— Raytown Schools (@RaytownSchools) September 8, 2020
The Raytown school district says it's not uncommon to have some tech issues at the beginning of the year.
"One of the issues we're running into is that those systems have such an incredible amount of usage now compared to in the past," Huff said. "Some lessons are being learned as those vendors go through the growing pains of having so many more users on at once."
Securly said in a statement provided to 41 Action News that the outage, which affected two of its eight clusters worldwide, appeared to be due to increased usage.
"We have been entrusted by thousands of schools to help keep their children safe online and recognize the seriousness of being a critical path between a child and the internet at large," the statement said. "Since this morning, we are confident that the changes we have put in place to our infrastructure will accommodate any spikes going forward."
Lee's Summit also uses Securly. The outage affected devices connected to the district network, not Chromebooks at home, a spokesperson said. For about an hour, teachers and staff couldn't access morning classes. They temporarily fixed it and virtual classes for grades 4-12 continued.
The Blue Springs school district experienced a power outage in a neighborhood resulting in some delays, but they also were resolved.
