ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — Many teachers and students reported slowdowns and other tech problems on Orange County Public Schools’s first day of digital learning. 

While most students were able to complete their school day successfully, it got off to a rocky start, leaving many teachers and even students wondering if these next nine days of digital-for-all will even work.

Count Winter Park High School theater teacher J Marie Bailey among them. 

“It was just really, really rough,” Bailey said. 

All of Orange County Public Schools’s 212,000 students were required to start school digitally Monday to take part in LaunchEd@Home. 

Students and teachers logged in to the learning platform more than 750,000 times, the district said.

With that many people on the site at once, it is not surprising there were technical problems. But Bailey said it’s tough enough trying to teach a performing arts class digitally. With all the tech issues, though, she said it felt even more draining than an in-person class.

“With lagging, and them not understanding how to work it, which it’ll work itself out, but I was so tired, and I didn’t get that energy from the kids!” she said. 

Orange County Schools Superintendent Dr. Barbara Jenkins said the companies they contract to handle the digital learning reacted quickly to the issues and increased the bandwidth, leading her to believe there shouldn’t be this many problems going forward.

“We expect it to be better tomorrow, and even better the next day,” Jenkins said. “So it will get better with time.  Now, we don’t have to wait until a third of our students are in the face-to-face setting. It will get better each day.” 

Bailey said some of her students chose digital learning for a reason, but they got such a bad taste in their mouths from the first day that face-to-face is starting to look a whole lot better.  

“They were hoping to stay healthy and keep people safe and keep us safe and keep them safe, but after what happened today, they were like, ‘I don’t know if I can do this!’ ” she said. 

Jenkins said if students couldn’t log on, or they’re not able to, they won’t be penalized for missing class.

While things may get easier technologically, Bailey said these next few days of digital-only learning will get tougher emotionally without the energy from her students.  

“It’s really, really disheartening. Because we miss that, we miss what the kids give us,” Bailey said.

She said she feels stuck because while she wants that in-person interaction, she also doesn’t want to risk her students getting sick spreading it to their families.