NYC’s First Day Of Online Learning Is Fraught With Technical Issues; Bill De Blasio Attempts To Save Face.

YOU GUYS. If you are a parent of a school-age kid in NYC, how are you not high-tailing it out of there?  THEY ARE STILL NOT IN SCHOOL AND THAT IS UNACCEPTABLE.

De Blasio is the biggest loser of a mayor ever, and we know this, but yesterday it got even worse, if that’s possible. 

Yesterday was to be the first day of remote learning for students in public schools in NYC, with some in person classes set to resume next week. But the online system apparently had massive technical delays and failures and crashes, because apparently this whole 6 months+ to slow the curve wasn’t enough time for the school systems to get their sh*t together in NYC. If you think that’s because of teachers’ unions and NYC’s general ineptitude, then you’re exactly right. They have the worst of all possible worlds right now.

In order to start some in person classes next week, a bunch of extra teachers are needed, and Bill de Blasio is worthless, so there’s no way there will be enough. He said that the city is “on track” to get the thousands of extra teachers it needs, but refused to get specific, simply saying, “We’ve had until now, a changing situation in terms of the number of teachers available, the numbers of students available. It has caused some real challenges in getting the numbers right, but what we saw in the last few days is that we surged a certain number of personnel to make sure the needs were filled.”

Mmhmm.

If you’re an NYC parent, how confident are you that the teachers being hired are actually going to be thoroughly vetted and that they’re going to be competent at teaching your kids? How confident do you feel in De Blasio’s statement below?

“What we are finding is, the thousands of educators who now work at the DOE, who are certified, ready to go, who were working at other jobs not in classrooms – they’re moving into the classroom. That’s working smoothly. The substitute pool is over 5,000, who are already certified – they’re moving into place. We’re finding more and more teachers who have taught previously and want to come back into the profession. Young people planning to be teachers in the middle of their degree programs – there’s a lot of different pieces here.”

And to address the technical issues plaguing the remote learning system yesterday the Mayor said NOTHING. The DOE’s statement said simply, “The DOE login page was down for 10 min around 9am, which may have affected Zoom, TeachHub, email, & other platforms. We were back in business within minutes & we’re continuing to keep an eye on it. Families who have any other issues can submit a ticket.”

Oh. A ticket. That’s helpful. Because honestly, how could the NY DOE have possibly known that a whole mess of kids would be logging into their system simultaneously at the start of their school day on the first day of school? HOW COULD THEY KNOW, you guys?

Ridiculous.