Online Kennewick classes crash Friday morning. Classes resume in the afternoon
Thousands of Kennewick students had an unexpected break from class Friday morning when the district’s servers overloaded.
Internet traffic from staff and student laptops overwhelmed the servers sometime around 9 a.m., leading to canceled classes.
District staff brought in more servers resolved the issue by Friday afternoon, said Robyn Chastain, the district’s executive director of communications and public relations.
Students won’t be penalized for the technology issues and the outage won’t impact the school calendar, she said.
While many parents posting on Kennewick’s Facebook page have been upset about the return to online school this year, most of the comments about Friday’s outage have been understanding.
“We’ve had issues off and on all day, but we’re just trying to take it in stride,” one parent wrote. “This is new territory for everyone, so we are doing our best to be patient and flexible.”
Some parents pointed out while the district-issued Chromebooks weren’t working, other devices did.
The outage came at the end of the first week of online classes for the district’s more than 19,000 students.
The district has seen a couple of periods of technical difficulty, including people not being able to reach the district office on Thursday.
“We are hearing many success stories from families about the first day of school,” Chastain said on Tuesday. “We’re also aware that some families are experiencing a slower start and need extra support in different areas.”
Other districts
Richland and Pasco did not have similar issues with their first week of school, according to spokesmen.
Richland’s Director of Communications Ty Beaver said the district has been helping parents and students with forgotten login information for their Chromebooks and creating PowerSchool and Canvas accounts. Both of which are normal for the beginning of the school year.
They also reported hearing about students happy to have an opportunity to see peers and teachers even though it’s virtually, Beaver said on Tuesday.
“We’re glad the year has started and are looking forward to students learning and growing and, ultimately, bringing them back into our buildings,” he said.
Pasco had some issues with its phone service on Tuesday because of a high call volume, said Shane Edinger, the director of public affairs. After the initial problems, there were fewer calls and the system is operating as normal.
And the district’s servers are operating as normal.
“Our schools are really focusing this first week of school on making connections with students and ensuring that they have all the tools and resources they need to access learning materials,” Edinger said on Tuesday.
This story was originally published September 4, 2020 at 12:30 PM.