Computer, phone glitches at Logan Elementary affect last-minute registrations

A so-called “perfect storm” of late-registrations and phone and computer problems led to hundreds of parents having to wait hours to register their children at Logan Elementary School on post.

Several parents called ABC-7 Monday morning to report the computer systems were down and the phones were not working at the school, resulting in them not being able to register their children during the first day of school.

Deborah Esperanza told ABC-7 there were about 300 parents waiting to register their children inside the school. The woman said she waited for six hours and was finally able to get her child in class at about 2 p.m.

“When I came in, they started filing people up in the hallway, taking names and they told us right away that the computer system went down and, an hour later, the phone system went down, so it was pretty bad,” Esperanza said.

The mother told ABC-7 she registered her child back in May, so she was upset with Monday’s confusion. “They assured me that everything was okay and that she would be getting a phone call from her teacher. She never did,” Esperanza said.

Gustavo Reveles Acosta, a spokesman with El Paso ISD, told ABC-7 registration has been open since May 19, 2018. Reveles described Monday’s registration problems as a perfect storm of events. “At Logan Elementary school, we did have a larger than normal number of parents who wanted to register their kids on the first day. Our computer systems did go down,” Reveles said.

The spokesman said the district also encountered a problem with transfers. Students coming over from the now-closed Barnett school were getting kicked back to their original school, Reveles said.

“We did have a handful of students who had been registered, but they were not registered here at Logan, they were registered at their home campuses because they had been transferred into Barnett, which no longer is an open school, so that was the issue that we saw here,” Reveles said.

The spokesman confirmed the computer systems at Logan Elementary were down, causing a back up. Administrators at the school registered students the old fashioned way: with pens and paper. “Manual registrations take a little longer, but it will not impact registration,” Reveles said, “Logan Elementary Staff will then enter the manual registrations into the computer system when it is back up and running.”

The school had registered most of the children by 2 p.m. Monday.

Esperanza, already considering enrolling her child in a charter school, is concerned. “I am wondering if this is an indication of what the school year is going to bring,” the mother said.

Reveles also saying that for the vast majority of the almost 60,000 students that attend an EPISD School “Everything went smoothly.”