TSD I.D. Numbers & Password Concerns
May 16, 2025
TSD I.D. Numbers & Password Concerns:
During last evening’s Board of Education Meeting a member of the community (Scotty King), who spoke during the Public Participation portion of the meeting, indicated that he had serious concerns that the district’s password security system is at risk for breach. He stated that in his assessment the system would be “easy to hack” and therefore gain access into district systems and information. He proceeded to provide an equation that he said would result in determining a student or staff member identification number or password.
Although the district has no evidence that a breach has actually occurred, and the equation provided was not entirely accurate, district officials are taking this potential threat to district data seriously. The district is greatly concerned that any person/community member would attempt to break district security systems, and even more concerned that someone would theorize publicly how one might do so. Mr. King did not contact any administrators regarding these concerns. Mr. King shared specifics of how one might access student information during public participation at the Board meeting last evening.
In an overabundance of caution the district shut down all student and staff accounts last evening and revised login and security systems throughout the night and this morning. Students and staff have slowly been able to log into their new username and passwords throughout the day today. By shutting down the system and restarting the new system today, this created issues for both students and staff and will likely continue into next week. The actions of Mr. King left staff and students without the tools to access their education. This created an unsafe security issue that disrupted all of Talawanda schools today.
The district is concerned that behavior of this nature may encourage bad actors to try and breach district security systems, and are taking steps today to anticipate and deal with any future concerns. I do not condone this behavior and the bad actors who are using students and staff to perpetuate their own personal agendas. This is unacceptable!
It’s important for the community to know that a police report was filed today. The TSD Board in a 4:1 vote approved SROs for all schools for next year. A Board member also recommended that we look at our Public Records and IT staffing to possibly make decisions on increasing staff to ensure cyber safety/security and meet the growing number of public records requests. TSD will meet this summer to continue to problem solve this and related issues.
If you have knowledge of any information that has been shared regarding your child, please share this information with Dr. Edward Theroux-Superintendent at therouxe@talawanda.org. The district believes that no information has been shared in this instance, but we need to know if these bad actors have caused additional harm. I deeply apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you, your children, and our staff.
In Education,
Dr. Edward Theroux
Talawanda Superintendent
