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French teacher Noreen Hanlon leads her class at Ottawa Hills High School in Ottawa Hills, Ohio, on Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2020. Although most of her class is there in person, one student was participating in the class via a tablet.
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TPS cites cyber attack for online learning problems; Ottawa Hills returns to classroom

THE BLADE/KURT STEISS

TPS cites cyber attack for online learning problems; Ottawa Hills returns to classroom

The first day of classes at Toledo Public School got off to a bad start as technology issues brought to a halt the online instruction that was supposed to kick off the new school year for 22,000 students.

TPS officials attributed the problems to “an unavoidable cyber attack.”

It was one of the latest examples of the hurdles school districts across the country have faced while attempting to resume instruction during the coronavirus pandemic. Locally different schools have taken different approaches, with many private schools going back to in-person class full-time, and public districts opting to either use remote-learning or a hybrid approach that blends in-person and remote instruction.

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At Toledo’s neighboring school district in Ottawa Hills, students on Tuesday were welcomed back into building hallways after two weeks of remote learning.

Earl Perrin carries meal boxes to his car in the parking lot of Rev. H. V. Savage Park, Thursday, September 10, 2020, during the first day of the Toledo Public School mobile meal distribution. TPS used school buses to distribute the food.
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District Superintendent Adam Fineske said nearly 80 percent of the district’s students are returning for in-person instruction while 20 percent have opted to remain home for virtual instruction.

“We expect that many of families [remote] will decide to come back eventually. I just believe they wanted to feel things out and see how it’s going to go in the district...,” he said.

Junior Bazil Frueh,16, said he is glad to be returning to the classroom.

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“It’s a little weird because we haven’t been back in an actual classroom in six months but so far it’s been going well. Sometimes, remote learning isn’t the best for students especially with the distractions of phones and other technology which happened to me,” he said.

The problems endured nearby in Toledo on Tuesday were not unique. Students across the United States have run into computer glitches at the start of the school year.

Tuesday was slated to be the first day of class for the nearly 18,000 public school students in Hartford, Conn. However, both in-person and remote learning has now been pushed back as a result of a ransomware attack there. Pittsburgh Public Schools students experienced Internet connection issues on the district’s first day of virtual school Tuesday, but school officials said the problems were fixed by mid-day.

Seattle’s system crashed last week, and a Zoom outage caused the district’s system to shut down for more than two hours in August. Three of Texas’ largest school districts — Houston, Dallas, and Fort Worth — were hit with technical problems, as were school systems in places such as Idaho and Kansas.

TPS expects smoother second week of classes
Bri'on Whiteside
TPS expects smoother second week of classes

Florida’s largest school district, in Miami-Dade County, had assured parents that it had consolidated different programs into one platform that would be easier to navigate. But software glitches and cyberattacks disrupted the first week of the new school year that started Aug. 31.

A high school student was arrested and accused of orchestrating a series of network outages. School administrators believe other people may be doing the same.

The online learning platform Blackboard, which provides technology for 70 of the nation’s 100 biggest districts and serves more than 20 million U.S. students from kindergarten through 12th grade, reported that websites were failing to load or were loading slowly, and users were unable to register on the first day of school.

In a statement Tuesday, TPS officials said teachers in the morning connected with students as planned, while the school system’s neighborhood food distribution program also got underway.

“Unfortunately, just before noon, the district suffered an unavoidable cyber attack and because of that, internet connectivity and email has been disrupted,” the statement said. “Our IT staff is working diligently to restore service and we expect that to happen yet today.

“Other large urban districts across the country have dealt with similar issues today. We have contacted the FBI and a local cybersecurity team to ensure our systems are secure.”

An FBI spokesman said the agency will not confirm or deny the existence of an ongoing investigation.

“With any cyber attack, hack, intrusion, it could be a lengthy time period before anything is announced,” spokesman Vicki Anderson said.

TPS Deputy Superintendent Jim Gant said district officials are working to resolve the problem in time for classes to resume on Wednesday.

TPS’s cyber-security provider Centracomm — located in Findlay — declined to comment.

Despite Tuesday’s problems, one TPS parent, Alisha Gillis, told The Blade the new academic year has already felt “more planned out” than last spring, when Gov. Mike DeWine unexpectedly shut down schools in mid-March, just as the coronavirus was ramping up.

Ms. Gillis said she believes that eventually, the online system will work for her two children, who are autistic and attend Start High School and Whittier Elementary School.

“Once this cyber attack is fixed, the temporary online schooling should work as long as the parents step up to the plate and help their kids where needed, make sure they are in an area with no distractions, etc.,” Ms. Gillis said. “If the parents don’t step up...their kid won't make it far in online classes...just as they wouldn’t in school classes.”

Other parents, though, said the whole process of preparing for the coming school year has been anything but smooth.

Pamela Garcia, a mother of an 11-year-old at Old Orchard Elementary School, said she believes time will be wasted during online schooling. She added that attendance on Tuesday took too long — the teacher had to call the parents of students not logged in — then it was break time, then lunchtime.

She said once the students began their math lesson, the system crashed and kids were left online, confused, and waiting.

Another mother, Andrea Greener, said getting class schedules sooner and having a test run could have spared her some frustration. She added that the day got off to a rough start when her youngest son’s second-grade teacher sent the wrong class links — which took two hours of troubleshooting to login.

Ms. Greener said the day grew more difficult as her son’s teacher tried to read to students for an hour — stopping repeatedly to ask kids to mute their mics — and then the system crashed, she said.

“He was done with it. He says, ‘I’m tired,’ ‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’ ‘it’s boring,’” Ms. Greener said. “I understand it’s the first day. It’s the first time anyone is doing any of this, I just feel like it was a cluster.”

Blade news services contributed.

First Published September 8, 2020, 6:15 p.m.

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French teacher Noreen Hanlon leads her class at Ottawa Hills High School in Ottawa Hills, Ohio, on Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2020. Although most of her class is there in person, one student was participating in the class via a tablet.  (THE BLADE/KURT STEISS)  Buy Image
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Bazil Frueh, a 16-year-old junior, studies in the library at Ottawa Hills High School in Ottawa Hills, Ohio, on Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2020.  (THE BLADE/KURT STEISS)  Buy Image
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