Parents and students across Northern Virginia public schools booted up their devices Tuesday morning to log on for the first day of online school.

Or at least, they tried.

By mid-morning, parents of Arlington, Prince William, and Loudoun county students flooded their school system’s Facebook pages with questions, frustrations, and confusion about the virtual school day.

Like many public school systems in the D.C. region, schools in Arlington, Prince William, Loudoun, and Fairfax counties, along with the City of Alexandria, opted for a remote start to the school year beginning Tuesday, after the pandemic prompted safety concerns (and several teachers across the region protested the idea of in-person learning.)

Arlington County — which originally planned for a hybrid model of learning — began preparing for an all-virtual start to the year in mid-August. But when students tried to log into the system’s online learning portal with school-provided tablets Tuesday morning, many couldn’t access their classrooms.

Mary Valenzuela is a single mom of a teenage daughter and a 7-year-old student enrolled in Arlington Public Schools. Both of her kids couldn’t log into Canvas, the online portal where students access classes and learning materials, on their devices Tuesday. Valenzuela says her daughter was eventually able to access Canvas through her cellphone, but her second-grade son hasn’t had any luck getting into his Abingdon Elementary classes on his iPad.

Valenzuela says she made sure on Monday night that their devices were ready, and is frustrated with the technology errors.

“At the end of the day, [parents] are held responsible for [students’] learning and progress,” says Valenzuela, who went to work at 4:30 a.m. and left on a break at 7 a.m. to help her son navigate the morning. “I’m a single mom of two. It’s just a lot to it.”

At 9:45 a.m., APS sent out an email to parents, stating that the school system is “aware that students are having challenges logging into their classes,” and apologized for the difficulties. The email directed parents to a phone number to report issues. A spokesperson for APS tells DCist/WAMU that the system is working to address a “firewall issue” and will be in communication with families later today.

After more than two hours of failed log-in attempts, Valenzuela says her son will just do his reading and flashcards with her in lieu of Tuesday’s classes.

On the Prince William County Public Schools’ Facebook page, parents described mixed reviews of the virtual roll-out. While some wrote that their morning went off without a hitch, others said they had trouble logging into Zoom.

“This is a nightmare,” one user wrote.

Similar scenes unfolded in the comment sections of posts in the Loudoun County Public Schools’ Facebook page, where some parents praised schools and teachers for making virtual learning possible.

“My 1st and 5th graders are loving this so far! Adjustments will be made as we go along but that is fine. Making memories and learning as we go,” one parent said. Others described technical glitches and online classroom struggles.

Tuesday’s virtual-schooling snafus are not surprising following last week’s messy first day of school for some families in D.C. and Maryland. Students in Montgomery County Public Schools ran into connectivity issues stemming from an outage of the internet service provider CenturyLink. In Prince George’s County, more than 200 public schools experienced problems when too many people used the same web server.

In D.C., some students began the school year on Aug. 31 without the DCPS-provided learning devices — and some parents whose students did receive those devices reported technology issues and long loading times.