Virtual school starts with a few tech issues

St. Landry Parish’s public schools started their first-ever virtual school session Tuesday and it was mostly successful, according to Superintendent Patrick Jenkins.
Eunice Junior High School apparently was the lone school not to start Tuesday morning. The superintendent said there were technical and staff issues at the school.
There were reports on Friday of staff walking out the school and Jenkins said “there were a few staff members that had some concerns with the principal. We are working through those issues with them.”
This is the first time that the school district is educating its 13,000 students online.
“They had some technical issues this morning,” Jenkins said of Eunice Junior High, but that statement included the district.
Eunice Junior High came up short of devices, he said. And, some parents had not finished registration on Friday, he said.
There was a three-part process to register. Parents had to pick up a device, register it online and then connect to the wifi, he said.
“If they don’t go through those three stages, they can’t login at home. And, we did have that at a couple of schools where parents didn’t go through each of the steps,” he said.
Complicating the process was the phone lines at the central office in Opelousas where people could call in for technical support were down for about an hour and half Tuesday morning.
There was another issue with hot spots, which are the devices used to access the internet and provide wifi.
The district ordered about 4,000 hot spots.
“There may have been families that got hot spots that didn’t necessarily need them,” he said.
About 250 more hot spots were to arrive Wednesday, he said.
The district has about 3,000 Samsung tablets and 1,000 iPads for pre-kindergarteners through second-graders, he said.
Older students are using Chromebooks.
“We know today was going to be a day where we had to do some troubleshooting,” he said.
Jenkins said a few hundred issues among 13,000 students isn’t too bad.
“Overall, the vast majority of schools had a pretty good start,” he said.
“The first day is always tough no matter if it is in person, but definitely tough being virtual,” he said.
“I think we are going to be getting better every day,” he added.