CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (KCRG) – The Cedar Rapids Community School District said more than 1,000 calls, emails, and questions came into its technology help desk on just the first day of school.

Overall, more than 4,200 help desk tickets were opened in the two-week period spanning the first week of school and the week before then, when the district distributed laptops, tablets, hotspots, and other technology to support virtual learning.

One of those came from the Reutzel family of southwest Cedar Rapids, on behalf of their son, Sawyer, an eighth-grader at Wilson Middle School.

“I had to call the help desk and say, ‘OK, what is Sawyer’s password because he doesn’t remember?’ And they laughed at me. They were like, ‘This is his lunch account number. He should know this!’” Sawyer’s mom, Stacy, said.

Stacy said their problem was figured out within five minutes, and they haven’t had to call back since then, with the first week going smoothly for them.

Sawyer opted for remote learning for the entire school year, trading in a classroom at Wilson for a learn-from-home setup on his school-issued Chromebook in his room.

“I did want to go to school at first, but then I heard, like — I don’t know, I just didn’t want to take the risk of getting COVID, and so I just decided to do online school,” Sawyer said.

It turned out, Sawyer wasn’t the only one who forgot his password, as thousands of other students in the school district also began their school years online on Sept. 21.

“That was honestly the most frequent call we took was, ‘I can’t get logged in,’” Craig Barnum, the district’s director of digital literacy, said.

While Barnum said they anticipated an influx of calls and emails to the help desk around and on the first day, he still said they were “inundated.”

“A typical week around this time of year, we’d run 300 to 500 tickets for the whole week,” he said. “Now the good news is, we’ve processed over 3,000 of those tickets and closed them.”

Problems ranged from broken devices, to students not knowing how to get into their virtual classrooms, to issues with some of the approximately 2,400 district-distributed hotspots.

“It’s not necessarily a week I want to live through again, but all things considered, I think we made really good progress and positive progress,” Barnum said.

In response to the high volume of queries, which Barnum said has tapered off since last week, the help desk adjusted its hours and brought in more employees to assist with students’ and teachers’ issues.

Barnum said they believe many of the 1,200 or so outstanding help desk tickets may have already been solved in the meantime, including by teachers and staff at schools answering questions before they reach the help desk, though help desk workers will still follow through with each open ticket, according to Barnum.

“We are able to, at this point, sort of tread water with the calls we’re getting currently,” he said.

As for Sawyer, his only issue on the second Monday of the school year was getting kicked out of a virtual class.

“I knew it would happen someday,” he said.

Otherwise, he said everything’s gone well, and the Reutzels’ biggest concern, about their internet connection at home, hasn’t been a problem.

“So far, so good — fingers crossed,” Stacy said.

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