Big Apple families are being guilt-tripped by the city into joining a remote-learning simulation on their kids’ day off to better prepare for an emergency after a technical meltdown during a February snow day.
Students and families have been asked to voluntarily log into their school systems at a pre-scheduled time slot on June 6 to engage in the non-instructional activity.
But they also are being warned that the set-up will work best only with their help, saying the more who participate, “the more accurate and useful” the resulting crucial data will be — infuriating some parents already miffed about the winter flub.
“I didn’t even know about this. But I won’t be participating,” Manhattan mom Alison Devlin told the Post on Tuesday.
Diane Tinsley, another mom from Manhattan, said, “I don’t think my son will participate because he’s wrapping up his senior year, and we don’t have time for this nonsense.”
Starita Boyce Ansari, who has a child at a Manhattan high school, added, “Instead of remote learning, invest in remote tutoring.
”Schools in public-housing zip codes have far less support than those in townhouse zip codes,” she said.
The upcoming simulation comes after schools Chancellor David Banks reassured city public school families in February that their system was ready to go virtual during a snow day — yet when thousands of them tried to log in, they were saddled with glitches and error messages.
“This activity is entirely voluntary,” the city Department of Education said of the upcoming simulation to test changes in the school’s remote-learning system.
“However, the more students that participate by logging into NYCPS systems, the more accurate and useful this emergency readiness exercise will be in preparing our schools for the shift to remote instruction in the event of an actual emergency or mandated remote day,” the DOE nudged. “This effort serves in conjunction with ongoing load testing conducted.”
Adam Bergstein, an English teacher at Forest Hills High School in Queens, told The Post that June 6 was supposed to also be set aside for professional development.
“I think this latest decision is completely asinine and indicative of how this broken bureaucracy tries to function,” Bergstein said.
“To assume students will be getting up and logging on a computer for no pedagogical reason is not only a waste of time but highly unproductive for all parties involved.”
Tinsley, who also said she hadn’t “received anything official from the DOE” about the simulation, agreed with Bergstein, adding that, “with no teachers/students available for this experiment, any data generated is irrelevant.”
A Brooklyn middle-school teacher, who spoke on condition of anonymity, claimed that the decision to change a contractually mandated professional development day into a day to test remote learning is “misguided and a useless waste of resources.
“The DOE is sending its instructional staff the message that they do not value the professional development they have on offer and would rather have us test a system that will have little to no impact on the remainder of the school year and will have to be retested in September anyway,” the source said.
“That, or they feel it is not in their best interest to spend time helping their already overburdened instructional staff develop best practices to reflect the evolving landscape of education, particularly in areas of instructional technology.”
In February, Banks was quick to blame the firm IBM — which handles authentication for the virtual platforms — saying that the company was “not ready for prime time.”
DOE officials then conceded in a March City Council hearing that IBM had only been contracted to guarantee 400 “transactions per second,” a set-up that quickly buckled under the pressure of a school system with close to 1 million students and staff.
IBM and the DOE have since been working together to improve the performance, scalability and reliability of their log-in services including a series of performance tests to endure high user loads, officials said.
It’s hoped the testing will report how many logins can be processed at a time and will be used to predict how the system will perform under the pressure of a heavy load of users.
Asking families to stagger their logins may also be involved in future remote learning days, officials said.
“In a world where extreme weather conditions are more commonplace, it is essential that our school system is prepared to pivot to virtual learning and that our students don’t lose critical instructional hours,” Banks said in a statement.
“We are encouraging every family to participate in this test to help us ensure that our families are ready to go remote if and when the time comes.”
During previous remote practices, schools conducted exercises at different times and on different days.
IBM was not involved in the city’s previous remote learning drills — a noticeable difference to next week’s session.
IBM did not immediately respond to a Post request for comment.
