NEW YORK STATE – The New York State Department of Education is extending its window for standardized testing after students in grades three through eight were unable to access online testing systems. It happened because of a statewide online system failure.

State officials blamed the state’s testing vendor, NWEA, for the issues. The department extended the testing window by one week to May 23 and plans to keep the tests on the NWEA systems for now. NWEA told the state it fixed the issue.

We’ve reached out to local school districts to see if they were impacted and when they’ve rescheduled the tests. The Spencerport Central School District said it rescheduled the tests for grades three through eight for Tuesday, April 22, and Wednesday, April 23. The district sent this message to parents:

“We are reaching out to let you know that the NYS ELA assessments must be postponed once again due to the statewide outage with their Questar system. The same issue occurred yesterday at the state level, and while this is not within our control, we appreciate your patience as we reschedule.”

The Naples Central School District released this statement:

“Our most significant issue is that when students paused the test, they were then unable to get back in (access) the test to finish it. our students were able to take the test, but the system would go on and off-line during the exam. While we have not seen these challenges for some time, they did reoccur this year and it is always problematic for our students, teachers, and administrators. They end up focused upon the testing system as opposed to the assessment itself and that is unfortunate.”

The Marcus Whitman Central School District released this statement:

“We did experience technical issues, which were very frustrating for our students, employees, and parents, but we will get assessments complete before the end of the week.”

The East Irondequoit, Brighton, Marion, and Honeoye central school districts said the outage didn’t impact them because they will hold their tests later this month.

AI assisted with the formatting of this story. Click here to see how WHEC News10NBC uses AI