The next time the city makes public school students have a remote learning day, the Department of Education may be forced to assign different login times — complicating an already difficult process.

“If we have a remote learning day tomorrow, we should be working to stagger start times, which we agree is not ideal from a student and staff perspective but it’s pretty important to us that we get it right if we need to transition tomorrow,” Emma Vadehra, the DOE's chief operating officer and deputy chancellor, said at a City Council hearing.

What You Need To Know

  • An executive with IBM, the tech giant and vendor to the city Department of Education, said its technology was not to blame for the failure of students to login to remote learning system during last month's snow storm

  • Education officials said they may consider staggering log in times for future remote learning days

  • Education officials said the city may need to change its contract with IBM to allow the tech company to automatically scale up its ability to handle login attempts on remote learning days 

That’s a lesson the Adams administration learned the hard way, after many students and parents were unable to log into the DOE's remote learning system on the morning of Feb. 13, when the city closed schools for a snowstorm.

At the time, Mayor Eric Adams and schools leadership blamed the tech vendor, IBM, for the login meltdown. But at a City Council hearing Wednesday, a top IBM top executive for New York defended the tech giant’s performance.

“It was not a failure of IBM technology,” Vanessa Hunt, the IBM executive, said.

Hunt also described DOE’s notice on Feb. 12 ahead of the remote learning day, saying, “The notification said we may have a fully remote day” and “can you please keep an eye” on the level of login attempts.

Hunt added that if DOE and IBM officials communicated at a higher level than just technical staff, the outcome may have been different.

“I think DOE and IBM agree on this. I think ideally, we would have been planning way before the day before, I think we would have been part of the simulations, part of the planning and we would have been better advising the DOE on potentially staggering start times,” Hunt said.

The hearing focused on the city’s contract with IBM, inked before the pandemic and characterized as outdated and insufficient to handle a school system with roughly a million children.

Lawmakers focused on the contract terms that offer the ability to handle hundreds of login attempts a second — referred to as transactions, not the thousands per second needed for a school system the size of New York’s.

“Why is it the case that you were still using transactions that are similar to the numbers in 2018 and have not updated those numbers and the services you’re procuring?” asked Councilman Eric Dinowitz of the Bronx.

“I think that’s a fair question, as we indicated this year and especially during a peak period, we need much more capacity than that to be successful,” Scott Strickland, the acting DOE chief information officer on Feb. 13, said.

Councilmembers zeroed in on the DOE not involving IBM in testing its own service.

“Sorry, but why were they not involved, given that they manage the whole system?” asked Councilman Shekar Krishnan of Queens.

“The objective of that test was to make sure our students and staff were prepared and could do the work and we had not experienced difficulties, again, across the pandemic with any of our major vendors that provide these services,” Strickland responded.

Education officials said the city’s contract with IBM should change. For example, by creating a system that would allow IBM to automatically scale up the capacity to handle logins for remote learning as needed.

Council education chair Rita Joseph said she believes such a system would allow schools to handle a citywide remote learning day.