TESTIMONY
Scott Strickland on Remote Learning Preparation and Challenges During a Citywide Remote Learning Day on February 13, 2024
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12 min
Scott Strickland, Deputy Chief Information Officer for Strategy Governance at New York City Public Schools, provides a detailed account of the preparation for and execution of the first citywide remote learning day since COVID on February 13, 2024, highlighting challenges and subsequent improvements.
- Scott Strickland narrates the extensive preparations undertaken for remote learning, including the development of emergency plans and system-wide practice sessions.
- He explains the significant login issues encountered on the remote learning day, attributed to system overcapacity, and the steps taken in response.
- Strickland details the partnership with IBM to address technical problems and improve system performance for future instances.
- The testimony underscores the relentless commitment to ensuring digital readiness and the learning opportunities derived from the encountered challenges.
Scott Strickland
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Good afternoon, Chair Joseph and members of the New York City Education Committee.
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My name is Scott Strickland, Deputy Chief Information Officer, Strategy Governance for the Division of Instructional Information Technology in New York City Public Schools.
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From this past, fall until last week, I served as the acting chief information officer for New York City Public Schools.
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On behalf of Transport Banks, I thank you for the opportunity to testify today.
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In addition to CIO, Owen Takob Shihil, I am joined by Zeeshan Anwar, our Chief Product Officer Joel Placencia, our Chief Technology Officer and Randy Asher, our Deputy CIO for stool planning modernization and partnerships.
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Before I begin, I would like to thank Speaker Adams, Chair Joseph, and the entire counsel for your advocacy on behalf of New York City School Systems.
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Students in meeting their needs in a digital age.
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I'm here to provide testimony regarding the steps the New York City Public Schools took In preparation for the remote learning day, our experiences during the 1st city wide remote learning day since COVID on February 13 2024, and the actions we have taken in response to the challenges students and teachers encountered that morning.
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I want to emphasize our dedication to ensuring the smooth operation of our systems and services, particularly during remote learning periods.
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While we strive to minimize disruptions, is important to acknowledge that we cannot guarantee that outages will not occur.
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However, what we can assure is our commitment to respond promptly and effectively to any issues that may arise.
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I know how frustrating it was for many students and families who experienced delays when logging in for class We are sorry we did not prevent this issue from arising.
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What do we do to prepare the schools to repair it to remote?
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This year, New York City Public Schools began preparing to pivot weeks earlier than last year in anticipation of inclement weather.
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3 anchor documents were developed, updated and shared broadly across the agency.
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The first was our emergency remote learning plan, required by the New York City Department of Education, outlining a plan should the New York City public schools have to permit to remote learning.
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The second was a digital classroom labor agreement.
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Requiring all teachers to establish a digital classroom by the end of September.
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And third, annual updating of the principal assessment for school readiness to transition from impulse to temporary remote learning checklist on our infill web page, which houses all guidance and resources for remote learning that all New York City Public Schools educators can access.
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Beginning in October 2023, We identified 3 priority areas to ensure schools would be ready to pivot to remote.
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First, students would have access to a working device.
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2nd, students could log in to their digital classroom, and 3rd, teachers have a set up have set up their digital learning environment.
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School superintendent points in each district and school directors in each bureau were tasked to support schools directly with this effort.
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Additionally, our central offices began reviewing data on these 3 data points, reviewing percentages of devices assigned to students, percentage of student logins and percent of teacher logins on New York City Public School Systems.
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To begin, We shared preparation guidance with schools and district leaders, including a checklist that included information on these 8 categories.
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Devices for students and staff, staff and student accounts, digital learning environments, digital professional learning, student supports and related services, attendance and student outreach, budget and human resources, and school community communications.
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On November 27 2003, Schools were directed to conduct a pivot to remote practice both in in school and at home.
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They were given a window of time for these practice to occur by December 8, 2023.
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The exact date each district set was set by the superintendent.
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These expectations were communicated through system wide email messaging to all New York City public school superintendents.
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Included this message was a letter for superintendents to share with each of their principals, and a letter that principals could share with their families, the remote readiness practice plan family letter.
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The focus of the practice was to ensure students had access to a working device, had access to the Internet, and could access their digital classroom, both in school and at home.
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In school, teachers were to assure that students had guided practice on logging in via their New York City provided username and passwords.
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Discretion was given to principals and teachers for additional digital learning activities done in the classroom.
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The at home practice activity ranged from a homework assignment to an extension of the day's learning conducted at home in the digital environment.
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These were activities to test access to the digital classroom for the student to complete asynchronously rather than activity of synchronous teaching and learning.
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By December 20, 2023, all superintendents confirmed their districts that completed the pivot to remote practice activities.
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During this fall and early war at winter to this day, New York City Public Schools regularly communicated and collaborating with superintendents regarding device and account access, including these 5 things.
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Ensuring superintendents knew what to do about centrally distributed devices not assigned to students and student accounts with no logins, requiring schools to inventory and assign devices to students, distributing all central devices to schools that requested them, a total of 700,000 central devices from April 2020 to December 2023.
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Number 4, helping principals gather information about home devices to ensure students' needs were known and accounted for.
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A total of 50,000 students indicated they had a device at home that could support remote learning.
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And we sent clarifying messages to principals on January 3rd that they could send school devices home for a pivot to remote day.
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Additionally, we worked within the New York Public Schools And Our Partners at New York City Emergency Management to improve our own internal communications and decision making process seize to ensure we could have it early and clear notifications to schools and families in the case of a remote day.
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February 12th, the day prior to the remote learning day.
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Once the decision was made on February 12th to pivot to remote learning, DIT notified relevant vendors, including an IBM and Nagaro, who runs our service desk, to ensure they were prepared to support the hundreds of thousands of students who would be logging in to learn, as well as our tens of thousands of teachers and central staff and support staff.
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We held a meeting with superintendents to announce a weather related system wide pivot to remote learning for the following day and to ensure districts were prepared for the transition.
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Superintendents were reminded to review the Snow Day closure guidance and to remind schools to send devices home with students who may need them.
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With regard to IBM, the DIT team sent an email at 1 PM on February 12th indicating that the next day, February 13th, would be a remote learning day for students and that we expected an increased load for user login authentications and for them to perform active monitoring.
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I'd be able to acknowledge their notification soon after receiving the email.
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February 13th, the citywide remote learning day, On February 13 2024, a large number of New York City public school users, primarily students and teachers, were unable to log in to New York City Public School Systems at the beginning of the remote learning day.
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After investigation, I'd be excuse me.
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Diat determined that the issue was related to the user authentic authentication services provided by the IBM Security Verify product that New York City Public Schools had been using for several years.
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Overall, the issues began and were identified by Diat around 7:45 AM.
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IBM was notified at that time I be acknowledged receipt of our message and investigated and immediately began to work on a resolution as did d I I t.
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After several corrective actions by both IBM and DIIT, the system appeared to be stabilized midmorning.
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New York City Public School Systems, including the IBM system, operating without problems for the remain remainder of the remote learning day and since.
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While there's no definitive data on how exactly how many students and teachers were impacted, what we do know is that over a 100,000 users were able to log in before 8 AM and between 15,000 and 40,000 users were able to log in every 10 minutes from 8 AM till 10 AM, totaling over 660,000 users.
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By the end of the day, over 1,000,000 students, teachers and staff were able to log in to New York Public School Systems on December 13th.
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The root cause of the issue was that a number of the number of NY New York City Public Schools users logging in prior to 8 AM to start the remote learning day exceeded the capacity of the system to handle that peak load.
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On the IBM side, the actions that we're taking that day included increasing the capacity of New York City Public Schools authentication services, along with adding more CPU processing power to one of their services and isolating New York City Public Schools traffic to one server.
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While moving all other clients to secondary servers.
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We also worked with IBM to turn off an alternative QR picture based authentication option to have users use the standard username, password authentication model.
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This option is for younger children and special needs students who operate and was operating unpredictably under the peak load.
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Following this 1st pivotal remote day, we were tasked with aggressively and accurately testing systems in the event of another system wide pivot to remote.
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We know how frustrating it was for many students and families who expected who experienced delays when logging into the class into classes, and we are sorry we did not present this issue from occurring.
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What has happened since February 13th?
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Since February 13th, the IT has been working with IBM to develop an immediate and the long range plan of action to ensure that the next remote learning day can avoid the problem we experienced on February 13.
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The immediate term plan includes the possibility of staggering start times on a remote learning day to distribute the peak load on the IBM user authentication service.
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DIT has also successfully completed performance load testings in its staging environment, which accesses an existing IBM preproduction authentication service provided by IBM for testing purposes.
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The objective of these tests was to establish measurements of the system's performance called a performance baseline.
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These preproduction environment was used by DIT is a close replica of the live production environment, but is not yet an exact replica of the New York City production environment.
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Longer term, both DIT and IBM were performing automated performance tests on their test systems to identify performance improvements that could be implemented to reduce the risk of overloading the system even at New York City Public Schools' Pete.
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Start of day volumes.
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In the past, while we had superintendents test in all of their districts, We did not conduct a load test where all students and staff attempted to log in at the same time.
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This would have been a substantial undertaking that would have disrupted school and or families and staff time at home.
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That form of testing is also not an industry standard in terms of performance testing.
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The industry standard is automated load testing in a nonproduction environment, as noted above, similar to what we do for our other systems.
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We are continuing to consider the best way to test all our systems going forward.
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As noted above, we are working with IBM to ensure we do all the automated load testing we can to ensure readiness.
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Once again, we regret the problems caused by the issue with this IBM system capacity.
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We value IBM for their rapid and effective response to the problem and for being a long standing partner that clearly prioritizes our students and families.
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In conclusion, New York City Public Schools And IBM recognized at the start of the remote day did not go smoothly, and both teams are working together to minimize the possibility of this occurring again in the future.
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Our students' family and staff deserve better.
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We appreciate the opportunity to speak to you today.
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Thank you.
