Navarro N

At approximately 9:35am this morning, Navarro ISD and districts across Texas were affected by connectivity issues with the STAAR Online Testing Platform.  Students taking the online version of the 4th and 7th Grade STAAR Writing Assessment and the 9th Grade English I EOC Assessment experienced interruptions and disconnections to the STAAR Online assessment platform. The majority of students at the Intermediate, Junior High and High School campuses were unaffected by the online outage due to paper testing sessions at each site. However, 65 students were enrolled in the online version of the assessment. Of the 65 students tested, 36 were able to login and complete the assessment with minor interruptions due to loss of connectivity. For 29 of our students, the outage affected their ability to login and complete the assessment. At 10:17am, the Texas Education Agency provided guidance and advised districts to cease testing students who had not been able to successfully remain logged into the system.  The Texas Education Agency has assured districts that students who were unable to complete testing will be provided the opportunity to complete the testing session tomorrow. TEA has stated that students who began testing will be able to complete the test from the point at which the connection was lost and student data will not be compromised or lost. The district is awaiting additional guidance from TEA this afternoon to prepare for the completion of the online assessments. Navarro ISD acknowledges along with TEA the frustration this has caused students, parents, teachers and administrators.  ETS, the testing vendor, experienced problems with their database system, which is in the process of being corrected.  The 2021 online administration of STAAR will be the last administration with the testing vendor.