Education Department addresses nationwide PowerSchools breach

The V.I. Education Department is informing the community of the nationwide data breach that has compromised the private information of millions of students, teachers and parents.

The department does not believe that information has been compromised for any Virgin Islanders. “This is not an isolated issue to the Virgin Islands. Most of you know this is nationwide issue,” James Richardson, director of VIDE’s Division of Planning, Research and Evaluation, said. Education officials held an informational meeting on Microsoft teams on Tuesday afternoon to brief the public on the PowerSchools breach and the cybersecurity measures they have in place to protect their school community.

They stressed numerous times to the public that VIDE has taken no actions that contributed to the off-site breach. “Basically, I must repeat that this is not here locally, this is outside the Virgin Islands, it was none of our accounts that were compromised. It was one of PowerSchools Superuser accounts,” Richardson said. PowerSchools notified VIDE of the cyberattack on Jan. 7 that resulted in the unauthorized export of teacher and student tables that contains sensitive data of the software’s Superusers. The hackers were able to access the information through a compromised account that has since been closed.