MODESTO, Calif. — Monday, Aug. 10, marked the first day of school for thousands of students across Modesto City Schools, but things got off to a rough start after a website crashed at the beginning of the day.
Instead of laying out outfits and lunch boxes, Anna Kenny laid out the opened district-issued laptops on her dining room table for her three children: one at Fairview Elementary, an eighth grader at Evelyn Hanshaw Middle School and a 10th grader at Thomas Downey High School.
As part of a kick-off event to virtually welcome all 30,000 students back to school district-wide, every student was asked to be logged on and ready to watch a back to school video at 8:30 a.m. from the Superintendent Sara Noguchi. But the district website crashed as everyone tried logging on at the same time.
"We were watching the numbers rise of all of the students who were logged in, it was at like 4,000, 7,000, the video started and we were watching it, it was about 8,000 views at the time, that were currently watching it and as we were watching it, we just watched the whole system crash," Kenny said.
The website was back online within the hour, but many students still had issues logging on throughout the day.
"It just kept saying the site cannot be reached, you can't log in," Kenny said. "They should have had this ready, like I shouldn't be struggling!"
The district said some district-issued devices started experiencing problems, so families were told to try using their personal devices instead.
"So if we're having challenges with our district-issued devices, until we can figure out what that challenge is, we're just hoping families can find a work-around until that solution happens," Becky Fortuna, a spokesperson for Modesto City Schools, said.
But that isn't an option for families like Jill Garcia's.
"Which kind of left us in the dirt because I don't have a decent computer at home, I only have my cell phone and we're dependent on the technology from the school," Garcia said.
The technical difficulties caused her 16-year-old son Jack to miss the first day of his junior year.
"Feeling like I couldn't meet the needs of my child at that moment, kinda disappointed," Garcia said.
The district says its technology staff is investigating these challenges and says they will put plans into place to prevent this from happening again.
"We know we anticipated challenges for the first day but if we all stick together and help one another out, we will get through this and students will learn," Fortuna said.
In the meantime, because of these technical difficulties, the district says there will be no penalty against any students who missed class on the first day.
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