AUSTIN (KXAN) — Messages from teachers and superintendents started flooding into the KXAN newsroom Tuesday morning saying children were sitting in classrooms waiting for state testing problems to be fixed. Today is the first day for STAAR end-of-course assessments.
A high school teacher from Austin said, “The portal kids use to access the test crashed. It’s a statewide outage. Kids are just sitting in rooms waiting for TEA to provide instruction to districts.”
A few minutes later, Bloomburg ISD Superintendent Brian Stroman sent this message he said came from the Texas Education Agency:
At 10:30 a.m., Stroman said he had just received word from his regional service center that EOC testing was canceled for the day because there’s no longer enough time for students to take the test even if the problems are fixed.
Stroman and a counselor in his district said their high school students logged into the system to start taking the test at 8:45 a.m.
“They got in at the beginning, then the system locked up and it logged them out — booted them out.”
He believes their work was lost. He received the first correspondence from TEA at 9:22 a.m. describing the technical difficulties. The service center told Stroman the problem was statewide.
“We’ve done everything right. We’re ready, they weren’t,” Stroman said. “[TEA] dropped the ball.”
Stroman said if the Texas education commissioner is going to push for online testing, they need to make sure it works. He said schools were given a choice to doing testing online or use pencil and paper.
The TEA said in an email to superintendents that its vendor, Education Testing Service, is “currently investigating the reports” of technical difficulties with the testing platform. The TEA said if students haven’t been able to access the test for more than 10 minutes, they can take a break.
“TEA will constantly monitor the issue,” the email said. “Should the issue persist, TEA will make a determination whether to stop online testing for the day.”
An email sent by the Round Rock ISD said the district’s testing day is canceled.
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