Dupage Policy Journal

Community Consolidated School District 89 recently issued the following announcement.

Community Consolidated School District 89 learned there had been a data breach at an outside company the district has used for some student assessments. Pearson Clinical Assessment confirmed to the district there had been a data breach in the AIMSweb 1.0 platform.

AIMSweb 1.0 has been used for literacy and math assessment purposes for some kindergarten through eighth grade students. CCSD 89 is one of 13,000 school districts affected by the data breach at Pearson.

Pearson supplied a list of potentially affected CCSD 89 students. CCSD 89 is sending an email or letter to the families of those students. If you did not receive an email or letter, your student was not on the Pearson list.

According to Pearson, the student data affected was limited to students’ first name, last name and - in some cases - date of birth. No test scores, performance data or other identifying student information were part of the data incident. The AIMSweb 1.0 platform does not contain Social Security numbers or student addresses.  

The district no longer uses the AIMSWeb 1.0 platform and will not be using it in the future. The district moved to the AIMSWeb 2.0 platform starting in the 2019-20 school year.

CCSD 89 is working with Pearson to ensure no additional information was affected by the breach. CCSD 89 takes the security of all student, family, and staff data very seriously. Limited data is provided to outside vendors. Contracts with outside vendors are vetted to ensure measures are in place to safeguard data.

If CCSD 89 receives an update regarding this security breach, the district will communicate with you as quickly as possible.

At this time, there is no evidence that the student data has been used. However, as a precaution, Pearson is offering free credit monitoring for one year to any CCSD 89 families affected.

Pearson provided the following information about enrolling in credit monitoring:

If you are one of those affected individuals or represent an affected minor and choose to redeem this offer, you may activate your membership and start monitoring your or your minor’s personal information by following the steps below:

• Ensure that you enroll by: January 31, 2020 (Your code will not work after this date.)
• Visit the Experian IdentityWorks website to enroll and provide your activation code:
  • If you are enrolling for an adult: https://www.experianidworks.com/credit
    • Provide your activation code:  PF7N9N97G
  • If you are enrolling for a minor: https://www.experianidworks.com/minorplus
    • Provide your activation code:  4GCYX5C69
    • If you are redeeming this for a minor, provide your minor’s information when prompted

CCSD 89 is not aware of receiving any notification from Pearson. The district reached out after hearing news reports about other local districts that had been affected.

If you have any additional questions, please contact Pearson via email at aimsweb1request@pearson.com, or Experian directly at (866) 883-3309.

Original source can be found here.