First day of school: Tech glitch, employees self-quarantining after possible exposure

Students across the Charlotte region logged on to the first day of school Monday, with many hitting technical glitches during a statewide outage as Charlotte-Mecklenburg and other districts reopened under full remote instruction for the 2020-2021 school year.

CMS Superintendent Earnest Winston said that despite the technology issues, he was encouraged by what he saw as he visited a number of CMS schools, praising teachers for their resilience and creativity as they reinvented public education during a pandemic.

“We are very excited to have completed day one,” Winston said. “I will tell you that the most encouraging part of today was seeing the teaching and learning taking place from day one.”

A temporary outage on NCEdCloud, a service that verifies student and employee identities as they log in to online services like Canvas, blocked some from logging on to the remote learning platform for much of the morning, but state officials said the issue had been resolved by late morning.

With dozens of North Carolina school districts opting to reopen under Plan C, or full remote learning, the majority of the state’s students started by logging on to a computer instead of walking into a school building.

Chief technology officer Derek Root said that while CMS had no control over the state platform, the district would be able to work around any future outages. Some CMS teachers were able to circumvent the issue Monday by sending links to live classes directly to their students, as video conferencing platforms used for lessons were not affected by the outage.

Winston said that any student who attempted to log on Monday would be counted as present, and would not be penalized for the outage on their attendance. Families who had trouble connecting should contact their teachers to avoid being counted as absent.

“It’s important that we as staff members provide our families with a certain level of grace during these challenging times,” he said. “We certainly want to be mindful that families are dealing with multiple things in their lives.”

Root said that the district had issued roughly 17,000 hotspots to families who had problems with internet connectivity, but that the demand for those devices continued to outpace the supply. Nationally, Root said, hotspots have been hard to source even as CMS has secured significant philanthropic funding to purchase the devices.

“Hot spots are a hot item,” Root said. “That work continues to be ongoing.”

The district is still working with roughly 8,500 students who said they did not have access to reliable, stable internet access at home, Root said. While that number could include families who have some level of internet access, Root said the concern was making sure students had a connection that was consistent enough to support remote learning.

Meal services

Cathy Beam, CMS executive director of child nutrition services, said the district served 69,000 lunches through its drive-through pick up program Monday, and had about 11,000 sign up for the meal delivery service that begins the week of Sept. 1. Beam said she’d like to see that number double.

The meal program, which will use the district’s existing transportation network to drop five-day meal bundles at student bus stops, is designed to address both the issue of food insecurity and employment for hourly workers, whose jobs could be at risk if they do not have access to alternate or remote work. Students who qualify for free or reduced meals at school will receive the bundles at no cost, while other families may purchase them for $15 a week.

While students were logging on from home, many of the district’s teachers and school-based employees worked from their school buildings, leading lessons from their classrooms and coordinating technology and supply pickups with families.

Ardrey Kell exposure

At Ardrey Kell High School, some employees were told to quarantine and work from home for 14 days after a staff member tested positive for coronavirus. The staffer was in the building on Aug. 12, one of the teacher workdays that preceded the first day of school.

Those who had close contact with the person were notified and told to quarantine, principal Jamie Brooks told school employees, and the school had ordered a specialized cleaning and disinfection process for areas where the employee had been.

The district did not immediately say how many employees were affected by the notice to quarantine at Ardrey Kell. Earlier, Winston said one of the challenges to reopening school to in-person instruction was the ripple effect of quarantines after an individual tests positive. In July alone, Winston said, 70 transportation employees had to self-quarantine as a result of possible coronavirus exposure.

Teachers were required to return to their buildings on Aug 6th for the first teacher workday, unless they were considered medically high-risk, despite some employees raising concerns about ventilation, symptom screening and safety. The district originally said employees would be screened each day before being allowed on-site, but later changed to have employees self-report symptoms in a survey.

Around the region

In Union County, which is implementing a mix of in-person and remote learning, teachers questioned the use of a cleaning solution issued for use in classrooms, WBTV reported Monday. Teachers in the district had told WBTV and other media Sunday that they had preferred to teach remotely to open the school year.

The cleaner’s label says it is harmful if absorbed through skin and can cause moderate eye irritation, the station reported, while an instruction manual says glasses or goggles should be worn when using the product. Teachers said the Union County Public Schools didn’t give them those warnings.

A district spokeswoman told WBTV that teachers are not required to use the cleaner.

Lincoln County Schools said Iron Station Elementary will be closed through Aug. 30 due to “the recent possibility of a linked cluster of faculty members,” WSOC reported on Twitter. Staff will work from home and teach remotely, the station reported.

Staff writer Bruce Henderson contributed.

This story was originally published August 17, 2020 at 10:15 AM.