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Glitches delay Boston school assignments

Boston’s school system is again delaying the release of school assignments for 9,000 students who were expecting notifications this week, officials announced Wednesday. Technical glitches were blamed this time for the holdup.

School officials said the problems resulted from a change in software used to collect an array of student information, which is being used for the first time by a computerized algorithm to dole out assignments based on the choices families have made. Many students are potentially being assigned to the wrong schools.

Previously, the school system said it could not run the algorithm until after the School Committee voted on a school-closing proposal, which the committee approved on March 25. The confluence of the two events means families will receive the assignments about a month later than usual, raising anxieties among families.

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“The accuracy and integrity of assignments is our highest priority, and the validating results for all 9,000 students has taken much longer than anticipated,” John McDonough, the interim superintendent, said in a statement. “This delay is unacceptable; of utmost concern, however, is that the process be completed efficiently and with precise accuracy.”

Families of incoming preschoolers, kindergartners, and sixth-graders who applied to schools in the first round of the annual lottery this winter can expect to receive the assignments on or shortly after April 14. Incoming ninth-graders should expect assignments to arrive on or after April 21.

With many families considering public and private school options, the late notifications will arrive well after the deadlines that many private and parochial schools have set for submitting tuition deposits.

“It’s frustrating that in 2015 that technology appears to be tripping up the district,” said JC Considine, a Beacon Hill father.

McDonough announced the first delay in early March, saying it would be unfair to assign students when dozens of families had marked schools slated for closure as their top picks, and the fate of those schools would be unknown until the March 25 School Committee meeting.

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It was the only reason the school system noted for the delay.

But in announcing the latest delay on Wednesday, the school system said it has been working for several weeks to fix the problems that have arisen from using the Aspen Student Information System for the first time with the algorithm.

“We just did not anticipate that extra time that would be needed to convert to a new system,” said Denise Snyder, a spokeswoman, in an e-mail. “In upgrading our systems, many of our existing processes and scripts had to be rewritten to meet the needs of the new system.”

For instance, students in East Boston were being assigned in unusually high numbers to the Edwards Middle School in Charlestown, raising questions about whether coding issues were causing the algorithm to skip over the Umana K-8 School, which East Boston families tended to favor last year.

In other cases, the problems have been far more complex when trying to assign students based on specific educational needs. For example, the algorithm should have assigned students who speak Mandarin, Toishanese, and Cantonese as their first language to a specialized program. However, only students coded as “Chinese,” which indicates ethnicity and not language, were getting assigned to the program.


James Vaznis can be reached at jvaznis@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @globevaznis.