Data breach involves Southwest Licking student info

• SWL Schools is alerting parents and students to a data breach involving student info
• A high school student has been disciplined by the district
• The Licking County Sheriff’s Office is investigating

PATASKALA – Southwest Licking Local Schools is alerting parents to a data breach that could involve the release of student information, including names, addresses and even Social Security numbers.

The breach could affect up to 113 students, Southwest Licking Superintendent Robert Jennell said.

Southwest Licking officials are notifying all potentially impacted families via letter. In addition, the district posted an alert on its website on May 19.

The district became aware of the data breach on April 14, Jennell said.

“We had a student report another student had information a student shouldn’t have,” Jennell said.

A subsequent investigation revealed the high school student had accessed fellow students’ personal data through the district’s computer network and a shared server at the Licking Area Computer Association, Jennell said.

The Licking County Sheriff’s Office is investigating the data breach, Jennell said.

Southwest Licking disciplined the student, but Jennell cited student privacy laws when asked for specific details on the punishment.

In addition to working with the Sheriff’s Office, Jennell said the district and its IT department have been working with LACA to ensure there are no future data breaches.

“We have put into place measures to prevent this from happening again,” Jennell said.

In addition, the district contracted with a data breach response company, IDT911, to provide any needed fraud services to potentially impacted families. The families will not be charged.

“It’s a really touchy issue,” said Jennell, when asked about contracting with the company. “There is a lot of identity theft in the world, and we wanted to make sure nothing happened to our kids.”

Aside from the names of students and their parents, the potentially compromised data included student addresses, dates of birth and, in some cases, Social Security numbers.

As of May 20, Jennell said he was unaware of any of the data being misused, outside of the one student sharing data with the other.

Although Southwest Licking learned of the data breach in April, Jennell said it did not initially contact parents for a number of reasons.

For one, officials were not sure the extent of the breach, including whose data was accessed.

That required further investigation, Jennell said.

Southwest Licking also elected to alert parents via mail instead of via a phone call because the district needed to comply with state law, which requires written notification.

Jennell said he could not provide further comment on the case because it remains under investigation by the Sheriff’s Office.