WEST BATON ROUGE – Students who chose to attend the virtual academy in West Baton Rouge Parish logged into the classroom for their first official day Monday. Since some technical difficulties were expected, the school system created a help desk to streamline the process.

“Be patient with us. This is day one. We're not going to let your child fall behind,” Superintendent Wes Watts said in a message to parents.

Watts says it will take time before all the kinks in the new virtual academy are worked out.

“We built this from the ground up back in April. It was a big undertaking, so we still have a lot to work out. But the help desk was an idea from our technology department to address as many issues as we could without the school having to do it every day,” Watts said.

The help desk consists of four full-time employees from the tech department, and a handful of volunteers. Parents can call or email in whatever questions or issues they are coming across and will get a quick response.

“Once we have all the kinks in the process worked out, we'll be up and rolling. And we'll make sure everyone is up to speed,” Watts said.

Twenty-five percent of the students, which adds up to around 1,000 students, chose to remain at home for school. The other 75 percent were back in the classroom last week.

The help desk will be open for two hours every school day. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, those slots will be in the morning. Tuesday and Thursday it will be open in the afternoon.

The help desk email is wbrhelpdesk@wbrschools.net.