By Heather Michon
Correspondent
Fluvanna County Public Schools is one of thousands of school districts caught up in a massive data breach of PowerSchool, the widely-used software company that helps manage information on students, staff, and faculty.
Superintendent Peter Gretz announced in a Jan. 10 statement that his leadership team had been informed about the breach on Jan. 7.
“PowerSchool informs us that the taken data primarily includes student, parent, and teacher contact information, with data elements such as name and address information,” he said.
The scope of the data breach is not yet clear. PowerSchool is used by at least 18,000 customers worldwide and holds over 60 million student records. Depending on what services a district chooses to utilize, the database can include sensitive information on both students and staff.
“FCPS does not store Social Security Numbers for students in PowerSchool,” Gretz noted. “FCPS does not store Social Security Numbers for staff except for teachers who are waiting for their provisional license.” He said the school was talking with “those few specific individuals” whose SSNs may have been compromised.
Multiple sources have reported to the media that the breach occurred sometime in December and that PowerSchool paid an undisclosed sum to prevent hackers from releasing the data.
PowerSchool has not confirmed these reports.
Gretz said that FCPS found that their internal servers and data network had not been compromised.
“Additionally we have implemented a password change for all PowerSchool staff accounts to make sure not PowerSchool account credentials have been compromised. Parent PowerSchool accounts are view-only and thus do not require a password reset,” he said.
