Notices of Security Breaches
PowerSchool SIS - 12/22/2025
Update 2/5/2025: PowerSchool is offering two years of complimentary identity protection services to students and educators whose information was involved. For adult students and educators, this offer will also include two years of complimentary credit monitoring services. More information related to this will be relayed directly from PowerSchool and Experian in the coming weeks. For more information, please visit https://www.powerschool.com/security/sis-incident/notice-of-united-states-data-breach/?mkt_tok=ODYxLVJNSS04NDYAAAGYUw2MUO7s22bXSJItiAlgmEBFVNWalGDtiyq1KO0p-XU50B8eEFDAuCSBFd7LEhIGkHpRwdIMs1g_cSp1oOM2Wnl6DJrVlt3qieCqYOlpB_z_tIk
Update 1/17/2025: PowerSchool will contact parents and guardians of current students, former students, current employees, and former employees to offer various forms of credit monitoring and identity theft protection. We will update this page as information is provided to us by PowerSchool. Should you have any specific questions regarding the data breach, please email the Director of Technology, Benjamin Russell, by emailing brussell@westbrookctschools.org.
Initial Notification 1/9/2025: On January 7th, Westbrook Public Schools was notified that PowerSchool had been the victim of a data breach. PowerSchool is used by the school district to manage student, staff, and parent information to provide students with schedules, contact maintenance, and grade information.
We have confirmed that a breach occurred on December 22, 2024, involving demographic information related to students and staff. Working with PowerSchool, we have been assured that the original cause of the breach has been resolved, and no copies of the data exist outside of our systems. PowerSchool also assures us that they will continue to monitor sources for copies of this information.
You may have heard in the media that social security numbers were included in this breach. This is not the case for Westbrook Public Schools. We do not store social security numbers or financial information in PowerSchool.
We will continue to monitor access to data and work with PowerSchool to further protect our students and staff. We will also continue to provide updated information as it becomes available.
PowerSchool has created an information page available at https://www.powerschool.com/security/sis-incident/ for families, staff, and customers.
Canva - 1/11/2020
On the 11th of January 2020, Canva became aware of a list of approximately 4 million Canva accounts containing user passwords stolen as part of the May 24 breach. The passwords had been decrypted and recently shared online.
As unchanged passwords might be used to access Canva accounts , we responded immediately to restrict access to Canva logins, and commenced work to both invalidate unchanged passwords, and notify users with unencrypted passwords in the list.
For more information, please visit https://support.canva.com/contact/customer-support/may-24-security-incident-faqs/.
Canva is not required software in our district, but it is important to understand the security and data privacy risks involved in this situation. Should there be any questions, please contact Information Technology Coordinator Benjamin Russell at brussell@westbrookctschools.org or by phone at 860-399-6432.
Edmodo - 5/11/2017
On 5/11/2017, sources including EdSurge, EdWeek, and Motherboard reported that Edmodo accounts had been compromised. While it is not clear how many accounts were discovered, sources have reported that it could be as high as 77 million. The account information found was encrypted, meaning those in possession of it will still need to break the encryption keys to make it useful. At this time, we are recommending anyone using Edmodo reset their passwords.
Edmodo is not something we widely use in our district, but it is important to understand the security and data privacy risks involved in this situation. Should there be any questions, please contact Information Technology Coordinator Benjamin Russell at brussell@westbrookctschools.org or by phone at 860-399-6432.