Schools across the state scrambled this morning as teachers and students attempted to log in to the testing platform for PARCC exams but couldn't due to a technical error, forcing testing to be postponed.

State Education Commissioner David Hespe called the tech issue "totally unacceptable," and said it was a problem with Pearson, the company that creates the exams. PARCC spokeswoman Heather Reams said the outage is isolated to New Jersey.

Teachers in Kenilworth schools discovered problems after about 300 students started the test around 7:30 a.m., said district Superintendent Thomas Tremaglini. He said students got through the first section before the program was shut down because of the glitch.

"The kids got booted off, the teachers were booted off," he said.



Kenilworth had planned extensively, including hiring additional substitutes to cover some classes. Now scheduling another day for testing will eat up more class time, Tremaglini said.



"All that money is wasted," Tremaglini said. "It stinks that it takes away from the kids and it takes away from the teachers."

Other districts also said the canceled exams come at a cost.

"It's disruptive, but it's also expensive for us," Freehold Borough Schools Superintendent Rocco Tomazic said.

Tomazic said he lined up 10 substitute teachers to help and now he still has to pay them even though they had no assignments.

"I've got a bunch of subs staring at each other with nothing to do," he said. "That's $1,000 down the drain."

He added that the cancellation is disturbing, especially if the glitch turns into a major problem or a hacking.

"If the problems persist, then that's another issue," Tomazic said.

The borough's district had about 250 students in the third through fifth grades at Park Elementary School scheduled to take the test on Wednesday.

He said the district will have to add another test day to the schedule for each day that the tests are canceled.

School officials in Edison -- Middlesex County's largest school district -- released students to class on "an abbreviated schedule," according to a statement on the district website, and the test unit planned for Wednesday "will be administered at the end of week."



Yesterday, Edison students had also been "kicked off" the Pearson test site in the middle of testing "with teachers then having to resume the test from their proctor access screen," the statement said.

Other testing coordinators also mentioned that issues with the testing platform appeared on Tuesday before the Wednesday morning failure.

"Pearson was having issues yesterday off and on but we were able to get testing done and they didn't affect us," said Bonnie Mingin, the guidance supervisor and testing coordinator for Clark schools.

Mingin said the 180 Clark high schoolers who were set to take the geometry PARCC exam today will do so tomorrow and that the school was lucky it could easily reschedule those students.

It wasn't the outage so much as the lack of communication from Pearson that frustrated Mingin, she said.

"I'm a realist when it comes to technology and errors," Mingin said. "We've been testing for two weeks and things were running beautifully. I'm not surprised something like this would happen, but we knew as early as 7 a.m. that the website was down. I wish Pearson would have sent something last night or much earlier this morning saying, 'We're having problems and we are aware of it.'"

In an email to school officials, Deputy Education Commissioner Peter Shulman wrote that Pearson has identified the root cause of the error and will be working on the problem this afternoon.

"Pearson and NJDOE will work this evening to ensure the system is in optimum state prior to testing beginning tomorrow morning," Shulman's email reads. "We plan to give you an update later this afternoon on the status of testing. If you have not started testing due to aforementioned complications, we advise you to send students back to the classroom. We sincerely apologize and we are doing everything possible to get the system back up. We will continue to be in touch with updates."

Reporters Tom Haydon, Marisa Iati, Spencer Kent and Maryann Spoto contributed to this story.

Jessica Remo may be reached at jremo@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @JessicaRemoNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.