WASHINGTON — The private information of special needs students has been exposed to the public for years, D.C. Public Schools said Tuesday.
ABC7 reports that the website BuzzFeed News first found that a DCPS “intranet” — a small network similar to the Internet that exists within an organization and is used to share documents and other information — launched in 2010 was unintentionally open to the public until BuzzFeed contacted school officials Monday.
The DCPS intranet contained hundreds of documents regarding the school system, particularly regarding the special education program. A database with confidential information about special education students, teachers and other school workers was also left unprotected.
In a statement released Tuesday, Dr. Nathaniel Beers, chief of specialized instruction for D.C. Public Schools, says that the public was “able to gain access to an internal website that was launched in 2010 and stores training materials for DCPS staff related to special education cases. Some student information was listed in those training materials, as well as login information to a database regarding the District’s special education students.”
He adds that no data was actually compromised.
“As soon as we were alerted to the availability of this information,” Beers added, “DCPS immediately shut down the site and the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) changed the login information to the database.”
Beers apologized to students and families, and said that the department will “conduct a top-to-bottom review of our security practices to ensure this does not happen again.”
On Tuesday, Washington Teachers Union President Elizabeth Davis said in a statement to BuzzFeed News that “This is a very serious breach of both teacher and student confidentiality and privacy. It’s premature to assume that an apology is enough until we know the extent of the damage.”
She added that parents and the union “would certainly want to know what steps will be taken by the city and the school district to correct the problem and ensure that such a breach can never occur again.”
See a report from ABC7:
