I'd say the shapefile explains it. Can you zip up a geodatabase and use that instead?
I'm not even sure what the object type is, maybe a unicode string that AGOL does some 'magic' with?
I might try and keep it simple and just try and do some string formatting to grab the numbers between the slashes.
completely untested and unsure of what Text(yourDate) will give you, but something like:
var dateString = Text(yourDate) --> var splitDate = Split(dateString, '/') --> var month = splitDate[0]