HOUSTON – A technical issue kicked tens of thousands of Texas students out of the STAAR Online Platform on Tuesday, causing them to be logged out and unable to log back in, a spokeswoman with the Texas Education Agency said.
The delay in service persisted for about 20 minutes, the TEA said. Approximately 140,000 students were taking the test at the time.
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"We believe no student information was lost during this time. We are still collecting data on the issue – there were about 1,000 school systems statewide that had a least one student who experienced the disruption," said DeEtta Culbertson, with the Texas Education Agency.
More than 1,200 school systems were testing at the time, she said.
Here's a look at the districts affected:
Klein ISD
A spokesperson from Klein Independent School District said 345 students were affected, including students in fifth to eighth grade. Its system went down around 11:15 a.m. and returned to service around 11:35 a.m. Students were given extra time to complete their tests as a result, Klein ISD said.
TEA said if a student needed extra time to finish because of the delay, it was given.
Spring ISD
Spring ISD released the following statement:
"Like some other school districts across the state, Spring ISD experienced technical difficulties with the online administration of STAAR on Tuesday, April 10. We are currently estimating that approximately 875 students were impacted. All Spring ISD students were able to complete the test."
Katy ISD
Katy ISD also confirmed its school district was also impacted. School officials sent the following letter to parents:
"As you may be aware, STAAR testing began yesterday across the state of Texas including at all our Katy ISD campuses. Unfortunately, soon after the test administration began, the Educational Testing Services (ETS), which is the state’s vendor for the STAAR exams, reported that a state-wide disruption to its server had caused multiple outages to its online system. These outages impacted students taking grades 5 and 8 reading, grades 4 and 7 writing, and English I. As a result, many students were inadvertently kicked out of the testing session and/or were unable to log back into the ETS system. In addition, some students experienced the assessment “freezing” and had to temporarily log off and log back into the system. The Texas Education Agency (TEA) and ETS were immediately notified of these disruptions. Students impacted by the outages were allowed to have missed time added back to their time limit.
"Katy ISD is not currently aware of any students losing their responses. However, we are working with the TEA and ETS and will be reviewing any testing trends once results are released to the district.
"Thank you for your support and patience as we continue to monitor this situation which has impacted districts across the state. We will update our parents with any additional information that comes to our attention."