BETHESDA, Md. — The unprecedented online start to school came with some glitches in Montgomery County Monday morning.
Maryland's largest school district had problems right from the beginning. Instead of "welcome back," ERROR 504 was the screen that greeted a lot of Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) students.
"Send those lazy servers to the principal's office," tweeted Brian Gleason.
Many students were unable to log on due to a problem with MCPS' cloud service provider, according to the school district, leaving plenty of youngsters and their parents frustrated.
"I just sat here, loading, loading, loading," 12-year-old Rachel Barold said. "It took forever to load. It was so annoying."
By mid-morning, Rachel said she was still seeing an error message. The seventh-grader was able to get into her morning band practice, because she'd saved the direct Zoom links to the virtual classroom. But the myMCPS site took forever to load, and she said 15 of her classmates never made it to practice.
"My friend Theo was like, 'Can you tell Miss Jacobs I might not be able to make it because it's not loading?'" Rachel said.
The school district said it's unclear how many students were locked out, but there were apologies and pleas for patience from principals across the county.
On social media, many parents were unhappy. An MCPS pokeswoman said the problem was with Amazon Web Services, and she said it's been fixed.
"Just like with any school year, it could be a delayed school bus, or I can't find my PIN number to purchase meals, right?" Gboyinde Onijala, senior communications specialist with MCPS, said.
Students at two schools in Prince George’s County had the same kind of issues, but after re-routing the schools to a new server, the schools were back up and running, according to Monica Goldson, the interim CEO for PGCPS.
"Definitely hiccups," Goldson said. "Now back up and running smoothly."
But for Rachel, her mom and many other students, the problems with virtual learning go way beyond overloaded servers.
"It's really hard to make friends this year," Rachel said. "I really just don't know anyone."
"That breaks my heart, actually," her mother, Helen Barold, said, her voice breaking. "Just hearing her say that, because it's hard. These guys are isolated. They're not making new friends. And this is an important time for them."