First day of school, internet trouble blocks online classes in Lee’s Summit, Raytown
On the first day of class in the Lee’s Summit school district Tuesday, hundreds of teachers could not connect with students because of a districtwide internet failure.
District officials point to troubles with Securly, the district’s internet filter. The problem at Securly, used by some other local districts and in schools around the country, prevented all Lee’s Summit employees, not just teachers, from accessing the internet.
The Raytown school district also reported limited problems on Tuesday because of the Securly issue.
“This outage affected devices attached to the district network but not Chromebooks at home,” said Katy Bergen, Lee’s Summit spokeswoman. “Some students may not have been able to connect with their teachers for a check-in or a synchronous class, but this issue wouldn’t have impacted students’ ability to access our online learning platform from home.”
She said that some teachers moved quickly to reach out to their students via Google Meets on their phone until the district created a work-around to restore service.
On its website, Securly reported that its engineering teams had identified the source of the disruption and ”are actively working on mitigating the issue.” Officials there did not respond to The Star’s questions about the outage.
The problem affected students in fourth through 12 grades. Students in pre-kindergarten through third grade were the only ones to return to classes in person, under coronavirus pandemic safety protocols.
To prevent the spread of COVID-19, the district, like several others in the area, started back to school with its older children taking all their classes online. Studies have shown that younger children do not get or transmit the disease as much as older students do.
The district plans to bring students back to school buildings in phases, based on Jackson County Health Department guidance on the number of cases and the positivity rate of COVID-19 tests.
The next phase will be a hybrid model for students in grades four through 12. They will attend classes in person two days a week and online three days a week, so that fewer people are in school buildings on any given day.
The Raytown school district, which also uses Securly, experienced some problems Tuesday just before 9 a.m., but it was not as widespread as it was in Lee’ Summit, school officials said.
“The issue only impacted Windows devices, which are used by staff and students in grades 9-12,” Danielle Nixon, district spokeswoman, said in an email. While all district students went back to school Tuesday — all online — “students in grades PreK-8 were not impacted by this outage.”
Raytown said their problems were corrected within about two hours.
