Stark County Educational Service Center officials said the recent global data breach of PowerSchool did not impact students at the county’s public schools.
PowerSchool is a software platform that allows districts to manage and store information about class assignments, attendance and other activities. It reported it was hacked through its PowerSource community-focused customer portal on Dec. 28.
The California-based company, whose website says it serves 60 million students at 18,000 school districts and organizations, told its customers that a large amount of student, family and educator data was downloaded by a hacker, who demanded money to delete the stolen data. PowerSchool paid the money and the data was deleted, but the company is working with the FBI’s cybersecurity operation.
The Stark/Portage Area Computer Consortium, which falls under the Educational Service Center, uses PowerSchool to manage student information at all but one of the county’s districts. Osnaburg Local School District does not utilize the software.
Tyler Smith, Stark/Portage Area Computer Consortium’s director of operations, said the application used by consortium districts — eSchoolPlus Student Information System — manages information such as attendance, locker combinations, transportation, medical, and grade books, and was not part of the breach.
A number of Ohio school districts use PowerSource, including Westerville City Schools. The district was still working to identify the scope of the breach but said it does not include students’ Social Security numbers in the system.
“We are very careful about protecting student information,” Stark ESC Superintendent Joe Chaddock said, adding that hackers are a constant concern.
Smith said extra precautions are in place to ensure outside entities cannot access data, including student and teacher information.
While the breach did not impact Stark users, Smith said they conducted a review of the system to ensure there was no impact.
In addition, the Stark/Portage Area Computer Consortium initiated enhanced security measures for interactions with PowerSchool and to protect its systems.
“We treat every threat as a live threat regardless if we were affected or not,” Smith said. “We will continue to verify (our systems) are safe.”
The Repository reached out to schools across Stark County regarding the data breach. Heritage Christian Schools and Central Catholic High School said they were not impacted.
Includes reporting by Columbus Dispatch staff writer Shahid Meighan.
Reach Amy at 330-775-1135 or amy.knapp@indeonline.com.
This article originally appeared on The Repository: Stark public school districts not impacted by PowerSchool data breach