ROSEVILLE, Minn. — It was a first day of school like none other for many Minnesota students.
The Minnesota Department of Education says of the 426 school districts and chart schools in the state, 267 are doing hybrid learning to start the school year and 53 school districts are doing all distance learning.
Based on those numbers, about 75% of the school districts in Minnesota are doing at least some online learning to start off the school year.
Every school district is handling this new learning style differently and every one of them had a different experience on the first day of school.
Several parents who send their kids to Robbinsdale Area Schools reported big problems with the technology their kids are using to learn at home.
“It seems like every single meeting they’ve had today has crashed, or they haven’t been able to get into it,” Elizabeth Senne says.
Senne has two kids in the district, a 4th grader and a 6th grader.
She says both kids experienced problems with their computers.
Fellow mother Nicole Lee says her high schooler also had problems with the system.
“She was not able to log on to her classes. She’d try and get kicked out. She couldn’t get into a video meeting, and she’d try to email the teacher and she couldn’t get into her school email to email the teacher,” Lee says.
In a statement the school district explained what happened.
They say it appears that only students with Chromebooks experienced these problems.
Students who have district iPads were just fine.
The statement explained how the problem centered around a content filter on those Chromebooks that was being overloaded with too much information.
The district says IT workers have fixed the problem and the system should be good to go for classes on Wednesday.
St. Paul Public School Superintendent Joe Gothard says they had a much easier first day of school.
He says teachers and students experienced a few technical problems, but overall, he says it was a good first day considering the challenges they’re dealing with.
“I think it has gone really well,” Gothard says.
Minneapolis Pubilc School superintendent Ed Graff says it's the same on their end.
He spent the day visiting virtual classrooms to see how different teachers are adapting to online learning.
So, some issues, but nothing as bad as what other schools across the nation are seeing right now.
In Washington state, many schools had to close because of the wildfires on the west coast.
And in Hartford, Connecticut city officials say they had to push back the first day of school due to a ransomware attack.
