Dear Parents and Guardians,

As you may have heard, schools across the state experienced difficulties with administering the English Language Arts (ELA) assessment on Tuesday, April 2. I wanted to take this opportunity to explain what we experienced at Stillwater and the status of students’ testing data.

On Monday, April 1, our middle school successfully administered day one of the two-day assessment. On Tuesday, April 2, students began the second day of the assessment around 8 a.m. However, around 9 a.m., I was alerted that several students were experiencing difficulty submitting their assessment. After contacting the State Education Department to inform them of the issue, we were told to “wait about 5-10 minutes before trying to submit again.”

While I assessed the situation, students were held in their testing rooms for one additional period. While students were seeing an error message on their screen, the tests were coming up as “completed” on my computer. I then went to each testing room and verified that each student’s test was completed and received in the system. To the best of my knowledge, all testing data has been received by the vendor.

At this time, we do not know the cause of the technical difficulties. I want to thank our students, faculty and staff for their patience and understanding as we worked to sort out the problem.

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out.

Sincerely,

Tim Hulihan
Middle School Principal