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Williamson County Schools to offer identity-protection after data breach affecting about 5,200 students
Summary
Director of schools Rebecca Scharber told commissioners the district identified roughly 5,200 students affected by a testing-data breach, will self-report the FERPA violation to the U.S. Department of Education, and is negotiating an identity-theft protection contract for families for under $100,000.
Williamson County Director of Schools Dr. Rebecca Scharber told the county commission that the school system found student testing and identifying information on a website created by an assessment specialist and that the district has identified about 5,200 affected students.
Dr. Scharber said the assessment specialist, Chris Nugent, had created the site for graduate research and that the information appears to have been inadvertently uploaded from testing media such as discs. “We will be reporting to the U.S. Department of Education that violation,” she said, referring to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). She explained that the district must notify the department and describe the scope of the violation.
The district has been assembling a call list, mailing letters and negotiating a contract with a private identity-theft…
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