More than 5,000 Redondo Beach Unified School District students had state-mandated standardized testing disrupted when their internet connection, provided by Frontier Communications, failed on Thursday.
“Email and internet access is very important to us, and high-stakes assessments are very important to us, and they’ve compromised the integrity of our instructional programs,” said District Superintendent Steven Keller.
It’s currently testing time across RBUSD, as students in nearly every grade level are taking state-mandated Smarter Balanced tests.
“Ninety percent of state-required tests are computer-based and adopted,” said Annette Alpern, Deputy Superintendent of Educational Services. “We’re 100 percent dependent on having internet accessibility.”
The district lost that connectivity in each of its 12 school sites today, beginning at 9:30 a.m., according to Alpern. That’s when she received the first call from a school principal alerting her to an issue.
It wasn’t long before the District’s Information Technology department determined, in conjunction with the Los Angeles County Office of Education, that the fault was with Frontier, the district’s internet service provider.
Thousands of students from grades 3 through 11 were affected by the outage, at least 5,000 of whom had already begun . More than 1,000 more students were scheduled to test and had not yet begun working. Among the thousands who had begun testing, little more than 100 had finished testing before the outage began.
Testing has been halted until Monday, Alpern said. But internet connectivity affects more than just testing; RBUSD has increasingly integrated technology into its curricula, providing each student from grades 3-12 with individual Chromebook laptop computers.
Most disturbing to the district is the lack of communication from Frontier.
“In our standard service level agreement, we should have a four-hour response time, according to our contract,” said RBUSD Chief Technology Officer Derek Kinsey. More than eight hours after the fact, the district has not heard so much as an estimated repair time.
“It’s quite peculiar for a telecom company, especially as a government business customer, to see this type of service,” Kinsey said. “It’s been a slow crawl getting help with Frontier.”
Frontier is in the midst of taking over millions of customer accounts following a multi-billion dollar deal with Verizon. Complaints have poured in from customers across the country as the company faced issues with their cable, internet and telephone services.
That won’t matter to the district by summer, when their contract with Frontier ends, and they transfer to a new ISP; one, Kinsey said, with connectivity redundancies in place should they face an outage.
But that change is still two months away. For now, the district and its administrators must still deal with the problem before them.
“This takes away instructional minutes from my kids, it takes time away from our teachers, who were busting their tails to prepare for this test and now they’ve essentially spent a day all for naught,” Keller said.
When contacted for comment on Thursday afternoon, Frontier Communications representative Cameron Christian said that he was unfamiliar with the issue faced by the district, but “terribly disappointed to hear [about it].”
According to Christian, Frontier hired an outside vendor to assist with phone-based customer service.
“We’re disappointed in the performance of the vendor we chose, and we’re planning to solve that as quickly as possible,” Christian said. “There are a lot of things that can occur around transition time — it’s a part of taking over a large telecom network — and combining that with poor telephone service has made it appear things are a lot worse than they really are.”
Keller, however, is incensed. “I couldn’t be more appalled by their customer service, their care, their follow-up and their inability to deliver what they knew was going to be a complicated transition,” he said. “Our contract with Frontier expires in two months, and those two months couldn’t come sooner.”
