East Lansing says PowerSchool breach did not affect district; superintendent credits internal protections

East Lansing Public Schools Superintendent Leo told the school board on Jan. 27 that the district was not affected by a recent attempted breach of PowerSchool student information systems, and credited the district’s cybersecurity network for blocking the attempt.

"We built a brick wall around our data to protect it as much as possible," Leo said, describing the district's network and its role in stopping outside traffic from reaching district servers. He said the district’s PowerSchool server contains historical student data that was imported when the district converted to PowerSchool in 2007.

Leo praised the district technology team for the protections, saying outside evaluators confirmed an attempt had been made on district systems but that the intrusion was blocked: "they did attempt to get to ours but we kicked back because of this network we had in place." He said the protections reduced potential cleanup work that other districts have faced.

The superintendent said the district will continue monitoring and communicating as needed but reported no confirmed exposure of East Lansing student records.

What this means: District families and staff were told that East Lansing’s systems were not impacted in the incident and that technology staff followed up as part of routine post-incident review. The superintendent did not provide a precise total of affected records for the district; the transcript includes an unclear numeric reference to the server’s historical data that is not stated definitively.