PowerSchool Suffers Security Incident

As a parent of students in the Council School District I received an email from Superintendent Pat Griffin on the 13th stating that PowerSchool, the district’s vendor that provides their Student Infomation System, had suffered a ‘Cyber Security Incident’.

The email goes on to state that the district was informed by PowerSchool on January 7th that the incident was nationwide. Additionally, PowerSchool has since confirmed that information for some district students and parents ‘may’ have been breached.

The information affected primarily included parent and student contact information. However, for some individuals personally identifiable information (PII) such as full name, date of birth and gender may have been impacted. On a positive note, the district does not store social security numbers in PowerSchool, so that information would not be affected by this incident.

A page on PowerSchool’s website (https://www.powerschool.com/security/sis-incident/) stated that ‘We take our responsibility to protect student, family, and educator data privacy extremely seriously, and we are committed to providing customers, families, and educators with resources and support as we work through this together.’

Griffin’s letter ends by stating that credit monitoring or identity protection services from PowerSchool may be available if your information was impacted.

Call your school directly if you are unsure they use PowerSchool.

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