"Today" host and weatherman Al Roker bashed New York City on Tuesday for not giving a day off school to students as a winter storm continues to batter the Northeast, but rather forcing a remote learning day.
"Of course, here in New York City, they didn’t cancel school," Roker said. "It’s remote. And the Department of Education is having all kinds of IT problems."
"Just give them the day off, people!" he added, becoming visibly agitated.
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"Today" co-host Dylan Dreyer said that she also heard about technical issues as a result of the snow from another anchor.
Show anchor Sheinelle Jones agreed that a problem with remote education was that "a lot of people don’t have parents that can hover."
"Just a snow day. Give them a day off. Let them go out to Central Park. Come on!" Roker said.
"All day recess," Dreyer added.
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Fox 5 New York reported that public school students in the city were having trouble accessing remote learning programs on Tuesday.
"Ahead of the storm, NYC public schools shifted to remote learning for the day, but are experiencing technical issues with services that require IBM authentication to login," the outlet reported. "When teachers tried to take attendance Tuesday morning, they received an IBM alert saying that their request could not be processed."
Fox 5 interviewed Chong Bretillon, a parent in Queens who said that she could not log into a Zoom meeting for her elementary school student.
"I just spent almost an hour trying to log in and log out," Bretillon said. "Everyone’s frustrated."
The X account for NYC Public Schools posted that it was doing its best to fix the issues for families, teachers and students.
"We are doing everything we can to get this right and we have over 1 million students, teachers, and users that have been able to log in since this morning," the school system posted. "We apologize to the families and staff who were impacted by this, and we thank everyone for their patience."
According to Fox 5, Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams claimed that keeping students remote was important for "keep[ing] pace" with school requirements.
"This is the right thing to do and this is a great teaching moment for our children," Adams said.
