A remote school outage might give NYC kids their snow day after all

Even though New York City schools shut down ahead of the heavy snowfall expected to blanket the area for most of Tuesday, the city is still requiring kids to attend remotely. The only problem is: schools couldn’t actually get the remote learning system working.

At 8:22AM ET, the NYC Public Schools account on X said that it’s “currently experiencing issues with services that require IBM authentication to login.” The issue is preventing students from logging into Google Classroom so they can attend class remotely, according to local news station PIX11.

It seems the system is starting to come back online, and NYC Public Schools still sent out an update at around 9:30AM ET saying IBM “has added capacity and improvements are rolling out across the system.” As noted in the post, the public school system uses IBM to “validate” users logging into the system, so it’s possible the city’s schools didn’t properly prepare for the thousands of students logging on at once.

School districts in NYC have opted to replace snow days with remote learning following the covid pandemic — much to the discontent of students. “Using this as a teaching moment to have our children learn how to continue the expansion of remote learning is so important,” Mayor Adams told PIX11 on Monday. “We fell back in education because of COVID. We cannot afford our young people to miss school days.” Adams’ words might have had more lasting impact if the system had worked this morning.

At least kids will get a taste of the snow day taken from them — even if it is for just a few hours.