January 9, 2024 - PowerSchool Cybersecurity Incident

Dear AAPS Families and Staff,  

 

Ann Arbor Public Schools was notified this week by PowerSchool, a third-party vendor, of a recent nationwide cybersecurity incident involving unauthorized access to the Student Information System (SIS) through one of their customer support portals. This incident led to unauthorized access to student and teacher data in school districts across the country.

 

PowerSchool engaged their cybersecurity response protocols, third-party security experts and law enforcement to investigate, contain, mitigate and prevent the data involved from further unauthorized access. PowerSchool does not anticipate any data being shared or made public, and believes it has been deleted without any further sharing. However, they have also committed to notifying all of the affected individuals and providing the necessary credit and identity monitoring services, as applicable.

 

At this time, the AAPS Cyber Team is working closely with the PowerSchool Cybersecurity Team to investigate what data was involved to determine further action items over the coming days and weeks. We anticipate that by next week we will have identified what types of data were accessed from our SIS. We will provide follow-up communication as more information is determined, including the specifics of what data was involved. We will also be creating a FAQ document and adding questions and answers as more information is available.

 

The protection of our end-user safety, security and data privacy is of utmost importance to us, and we are working as quickly as possible to determine the specific implications for those individuals involved in this cybersecurity incident.

 

Sincerely,

 

Jazz Parks,

Superintendent 

Ann Arbor Public Schools