Two South Florida Democratic state senators are calling on Gov. Rick Scott to suspend the state's standardized testing now underway.

Sen. Dwight Bullard and Sen. Jeff Clemens sent a letter to Scott on Tuesday.

The legislators called the serious technological problems that marred the first day of testing "nothing less than a disaster."

There have been issues around the state, including quite a few in the Tampa Bay area.

On Monday, districts across the state, including in the Bay area, suspended the Florida Standards Assessment (FSA) testing due to technical issues. School district officials said it appears an online portal was overwhelmed by the number of students trying to log in.

Despite assurances from state education officials that testing could resume, additional computerized testing issues arose on Tuesday. The main issues students are seeing is that they cannot log in to the test to take it or they get kicked out mid-way through the exam. Their answers aren't saved either.

Polk and Pasco county schools suspended computerized testing today for eighth-, ninth- and 10th-graders due to technical issues. Polk said it would resume testing for grades 8 to 10 Wednesday.

In Hillsborough County, school officials reported that 75 percent of its schools had some sort of an issue on Tuesday.

Pasco Superintendent Kurt Browning had already postponed some testing until Wednesday, saying he was not confident the issues would be corrected by Tuesday.

"The state, I think, dropped the ball," he said. "We kept being told, 'It's going to be fine, we're ready,' and it gets rolled out and we have glitches, headaches, backups, frustrations, and everyones on edge about everything."

At New Port Richey's Seven Springs Middle School, Principal Chris Dunning said suspending the tests was best for the students.

"We didn’t want students or teachers to get frazzled," Dunning said. "Or get more frustration from a testing system by getting logged off or not being able to log in."

Pinellas schools officials said there was some slow loading of computerized tests, but that high school students were able to take tests Tuesday morning.

Manatee and Citrus schools did not report any issues Tuesday.

There is a two-week window - plus another makeup window - for students to complete the tests.

The glitches were not totally unexpected, as there were issues during the practice exam earlier this year.

Earlier Tuesday, Stewart said the department worked with AIR (American Institutes for Research) throughout the day and into the evening yesterday to better understand the issues that affected online testing in Florida on Monday.

AIR has determined that a software issue caused log-in issues, including delays and error messages for a number of districts. AIR reports that of the 69,177 tests that were started yesterday, 67,745 were successfully completed.

"AIR and its hosting provider, Rackspace, have worked to ensure that service is restored to the servers that support the Florida Standards Assessment (FSA)," part of Department of Education email read. "Last night (Monday), AIR conducted an additional load test on the hardware that supports FSA and it showed improved performance after the software changes.

"AIR will continue to monitor server performance throughout the entire FSA testing window."

The Florida PTA released a statement about it would like to see with the testing in attempts to aid students:

The multiple problems our students experienced this week while trying to take this new high stakes test has done little to help our students improve academically. As a way forward, to end the confusion Florida PTA recommends that the Florida Department of Education and the state:

  •  Allow for proper field-testing and test development in areas with similar demographics to Florida's diverse demographics
  • Suspend the issuance of school letter grades until performance data has been deemed reliable
  • Allow additional testing and calculation flexibility to students with disabilities and students who speak limited English
  • Consider using multiple years of a new exam as a baseline for generating school grades and teacher evaluations

Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.