Parents Face Tech Troubles, Long Hold Times for Help During First Week of Online School

Lourdes Estrada’s son and grandson had trouble connecting to classes on Zoom in Southeast L.A. because of internet issues.

Mayra Zamora, parent of two LAUSD students in San Pedro, spent most of the first week of virtual school on hold.

Her kid’s district-issued Wi-Fi hotspot did not work so she spent multiple hours over multiple days calling the LAUSD helpline, LAUSD’s IT department and Verizon. She wound up getting a new hotspot from her school, but that also didn’t work so she started the process all over again.

“I was on hold for almost an hour and a half [Wednesday],” she said. “We watched three episodes on Netflix [while waiting on hold] only to be transferred to the IT department to be put on hold another 50 minutes. His response at 4 p.m. was, ‘I’ll put in a ticket for you for tomorrow.’ They got inundated with so many phone calls.”

Unfortunately, Thursday, the first regular day of instruction, was equally frustrating. LAUSD’s learning management system, Schoology, “went down,” she said. “At 10 a.m., we got the message from both of their schools that they’re having issues.”

In addition, her younger son’s school-issued iPad could not connect to the Internet because of the privacy protection software installed. “My poor child can’t even log into some of his classes,” she said.

Eventually, her older son helped fix the issue, but for many parents, the first week was a morass of technical difficulties and long wait times for help.   

Magda Vargas, whose daughter attends Elizabeth Learning Center in Cudahy, said she was unable to connect with her daughter’s teacher for the initial meet and greet Wednesday.

“I really don’t know if it was an issue with my internet connection or if it was an issue for the whole district or just my daughter's school,” she said. “Supposedly, I have the best, fastest internet service, so I don’t know for sure what went wrong. We tried for a while until I got really frustrated. And then I had other parents calling for help and I was already giving up. I’m really sad that we couldn't make it work.”

Parent Xochitl Capilla also had a difficult time Thursday in Southeast L.A. trying to help her children access their first day of virtual instruction. “They struggled to log on, and our Internet was coming and going or would freeze," Capilla said. "I imagine that this is all because of the amount of people that are on Zoom.”

On the Westside, at Broadway Elementary in Venice, parent Lily Chan, whose daughter is in 5th grade at the Mandarin Immersion program, said the teachers had been reaching out to families by phone and email for the past month to make sure every parent was able to log their kids in before classes started today. As a result, nearly all the kids were able to attend class Thursday.

“It’s much better than I thought it was going to be,” Chan said. Her daughter, however, started feeling ill two hours into class. Her head ached, her back hurt, and she felt like she was going to throw up. “It’s a little overwhelming,” Chan said.  

A parent in Faircrest Heights, who asked to be identified only by the name Rico, has two LAUSD kids entering kindergarten. He got a text telling him that he had not registered for LAUSD’s Parent Portal, something he said he actually did six months ago. Despite working in IT, he was surprised by the complexity of using Schoology.

“As a parent there’s a lot of things you need to read. It’s not user-friendly,” he said. “All these months to make it a little more like Turbotax, which is pretty darn easy, and they didn’t. That was a missed opportunity.”

Once he figured out how to log onto Schoology, he found one video there instructing him how to log onto Schoology. “Gee, thanks for the video instructions on how to do something I already had to do,” he said. “What a mess.”  

Technical issues were not the only challenges parents faced. Parent Adriana Ruiz had to manage five kids all Zooming from home at once for classes at Elizabeth Learning Center. “We logged in perfectly fine, but I wanted to be there for all five of them,” she said. “Some were upstairs and some downstairs. I was running back and forth. It was a bit hectic.”

Perla Esparza’s son was thrilled to see his classmates and teachers online.

Ashley Ranshaw, a parent at Millikan Middle School in Sherman Oaks, said that she wished the first contact on Tuesday had been with a teacher rather than just pre-recorded videos and an “inane checklist” that made her son feel like this year was going to, in his words, “suck again.” He and his classmates all started playing video games almost immediately. “Can you imagine the people who took off a day of work for this?” she asked. 

Likewise, Maryam Qudrat, another parent at Millikan, said the social-emotional component that UTLA said teachers would emphasize consisted of telling the kids to breathe in and breathe out. She wishes, instead, that the school had facilitated Zoom lunch meetings for the kids to just hang out freely. “There was no interaction between the children getting to know each other,” she said.

But her greatest concern involved the scarce amount of live instruction time her child received. She does not believe there’s nearly enough time to cover the material that should be covered this year. Qudrat wants LAUSD to measure precisely what material the kids are learning and what they’re missing so that she can find a way to supplement. “There’s a serious deficit,” she said, “a dramatic deficit.”

Security problems were also an issue. A freshman class at Van Nuys High was Zoom bombed by a screaming naked man, one source said.

Despite the challenges of learning online, parent Perla Esparza said her son with severe special needs was thrilled to get connected again to his school community at Linda Marquez High School in Huntington Park. “This first day is very beautiful for Joshua because he misses seeing his friends and teachers," she said. While the start of the new school year was "a little difficult for me," she said, "I’m going to try to be there 100% for my kids.”