Brevard, Seminole County students face technical difficulties on first day of virtual learning

Some Central Florida students and parents faced technical difficulties on the first day of classes -- and many vented their frustration on social media.

Brevard County mother Jennifer Myer says she spent nearly half-an-hour trying to get her son logged on. Monday was the county's first day back.

Officials say around 20,000 students are learning from home. Many parents say they do not want to risk sending their children back to the classroom.

"Full class sizes -- I don’t think that’s a good idea and I don’t see how they’re going to keep the kids the distance apart that they’re supposed to be," Myer said.

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The district is asking parents and students to be patient as they work through technical problems.

In Seminole County, those who chose the virtual option struggled to logon to their classes due to system overloads.

During a normal school year, there are typically a few hundred students using the virtual learning platform. However, this year there are 14,000 virtual school students in Seminole County alone.

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"We went to log on and we couldn’t log on. We kept getting the same error message and I kept hearing from friends of mine like 'are you getting this error message? Is it just me?'
We were able to finally log in and got maybe 30 minutes of work done and then after that probably around lunchtime it got overwhelmed and so slow," said one parent.

The district says the system was back up and running by the end of the day.

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