Wake school board declines to move forward with letter supporting PowerSchool investigation

The Wake school board won't write a letter in support of Attorney General Jeff Jackson's investigation into PowerSchool.

Board members declined to second a board member's motion to send one. Afterward, they said the letter wasn't needed because Jackson's office is already investigating.

Board Member Cheryl Caulfield, a Republican, proposed the letter to encourage legal action and said it was part of a joint effort with other school boards.

Democratic board members declined to second the motion. They said the attorney general is already taking action.

The nine-member board was missing three members -- Chairman Chris Heagarty and members Lynn Edmonds and Wing Ng. Vice Chairman Tyler Swanson presided over the meeting and by rule cannot make motions or second them. The remaining four members -- Lindsay Mahaffey, Christina Gordon, Sam Hershey and Toshiba Rice -- declined to second Caulfield's motion.

"From my perspective, it was already being done," Hershey said after the meeting, adding that he supports what Jackson is doing. Gordon agreed.

A cybersecurity breach in December exposed more than 300,000 current and former North Carolina teachers' social security numbers.

The draft letter would not have triggered action but said the board supported any legal action that Jackson might take against the company.
"Legal action may be the best means to hold PowerSchool accountable," the draft letter stated.

PowerSchool has been notifying teachers and families of the breach and offering two years of credit monitoring from Experian.

People have until May 30 at 1:59 a.m. to sign up for credit monitoring. The message from Experian should contain a code to register that won't work after that time.

Jackson announced his investigation into PowerSchool on Feb. 6 and said he'll "take additional legal action if necessary."

PowerSchool has since 2013 provided the statewide student information system that contains millions of datapoints on North Carolina students and teachers. Infinite Campus will begin providing this service July 1 to all public schools, though many have already transitioned to the new software.

The North Carolina State Board of Education voted in November 2023 to make the change, after the state required an upgrade to its system.

But former students and teachers were still affected by the December breach because their data was still in the system.

The Department of Public Instruction has said all schools that had ever used PowerSchool were affected to an extent, even if they had stopped using PowerSchool.

The two tables accessed had 134 columns, according to the Wake County Public School System, though not all were still in use or necessarily in use in North Carolina. Those columns included lunch and fee account balances, dates of birth, emergency contacts, parents, ethnicity, addresses, phone numbers, emails, grade-point averages and student identification numbers.

PowerSchool has said the data was destroyed but that it's working with law enforcement to ensure it doesn't end up on the Internet.

But cybersecurity experts have cautioned people to act as though the data wasn't destroyed, citing the lack of guarantee that a company can have that the data has truly been destroyed.