Parents left hanging after Summer Fun online registration debacle

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    HONOLULU (KITV) — Registration for a popular kids’ summer program run by the City of Honolulu started yesterday, but the process left many parents hanging.

It’s called Summer Fun, but the process to snag a spot in the city’s free program is anything but.

The Department of Parks and Recreation is offering space for 6,000 kids at more than 60 sites across Oahu. Parents were told to register online at 9 on Saturday morning. But the site crashed.

“It was a big fail,” said Kathlyn Mcelyea of Manoa. “I felt like I was getting concert tickets for like, you know, Britney Spears circa 1997 or something.”

Mcelyea says competition is so fierce in Manoa that she asked her husband and brother to help register.

“You can’t beat the cost. And our daughter just had such a good time last year,” Mcelyea said. “There’s probably a lot of folks who could really use the childcare and kids who have been like, at home and not out with peers.”

Mcelyea didn’t have issues last year, but believes demand is even higher now that families feel safer.

Samantha Ueno of McCully spent two hours trying to log in.

“I was just refreshing, refreshing, and the page wouldn’t load. And then when it loaded, I was logged out. And then I would try to log back in it would go it would not log me in it would get a 504 error. Like it was just nuts,” Ueno said.

According to the Parks and Recreation website, the Online System had technical difficulties and directed people to register in person. Mcelyea was able to register that way, but Ueno couldn’t.

“We’re still kind of in a pandemic, we’re doing the social distancing. So that’s not really a good thing for the sites to be doing,” Ueno said.

A DPR spokesman told KITV-4: “We will be assessing more of this past weekend’s situation and determine the best steps moving forward for the additional registrations scheduled for next weekend.”

It’s not clear how the City plans to “accommodate both online and in-person registrations in a fair and equitable manner” as it says on its website.

“With the technology we have at our fingertips, they could have done a little better. And like, especially with all the experiences like the unemployment portal, and like, that whole thing, like you think that the government would have maybe learned a little bit,” Ueno said. “I’m just disappointed.”

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