KANSAS CITY, Mo. — With more people at home driving up online traffic, many school districts expected some issues to arise with online learning.
They’re coming up with more solutions to make sure all students are covered.
"You try to work on the computer and it says, 'Oops something went wrong, connectivity issues, we're working on it,'" said Sheila Salmond, who has two kids in high school and one kid in elementary school in the Lee's Summit R-7 School District.
Families across the metro are likely having the same issue as the Salmond family.
As their students are doing school work online, the networks are crashing and causing delays.
The Lee's Summit school district uses Schoology, a national online learning platform. Schoology is experiencing delays nationwide.
"My teachers have been really understanding and lenient on times, like they understand when Schoology is down and they’ll give extended periods," said Mason Salmond, a junior in high school.
For many high school students, doing schoolwork on a laptop isn't anything new, but it can be quite an adjustment for the younger kids, especially with these disruptions.
"It’s kind of difficult because sometimes you get frustrated on things," said Adalyn Salmond, who is in second grade.
Sheila said sometimes it'll take hours to figure out how to fix a problem online, talk to the teacher, then get Adalyn's focus back on track.
"Our teachers have been great. We’ve just been very honest with them and told them when we’re struggling," Sheila said.
Like Lee's Summit, the Shawnee Mission School District experienced outages on Monday and Tuesday.
"We had an issue with our VPN, which allows our student devices to connect to the Internet. We had some challenges with our appliances which we worked on Monday and I believe we have fixed," said David Smith, spokesperson for the district.
On Monday, the district said they identified the issue within the internal hardware, but the outage on Tuesday seems to have been an Internet Service Provider issue, which was experienced nationwide.
School districts are watching the online traffic to find ways to broaden their networks, but say this is a broader national issue.
Some districts may start issuing more homework on paper.
Shawnee Mission has a help desk set up for tech support Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. You can access the help desk here.
For students without internet access at home, Smith said families can pull up to any of the school parking lots to use its WiFi to download work packets to take home.
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