NYC schools crippled by Illuminate Education's data outage

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A company that makes millions in New York City taxpayer funds providing software to manage student data has been out of service for a week, hampering schools and raising fears of a privacy breach.

Illuminate Education sells a system called Skedula for teachers and administrators to track student attendance, grades, special-ed plans, behavioral problems and family contact information. A related system, Pupil Path, lets students and parents log on for information.

When the systems went down last Saturday, Illuminate said it appeared to be “the result of an attempted security incident.” The company did not explain or return messages from The Post, but emailed principals Friday it is transferring the data to a “new secured environment.”

The city Department of Education gave no reason for the shutdown, but some experts suggest Illuminate may be a victim of ransomware, in which hackers freeze a system and demand payments to release it. Such attacks have crippled other education agencies.

Illuminate has raked in more than $16 million from DOE schools in the last three years, records show.

The company is also linked to a scandal under ex-Chancellor Richard Carranza, who hired a California friend, Abram Jimenez, with a financial stake in Illuminate. Jimenez abruptly quit his $205,000-a-year job when the conflict-of-interest was exposed.

Teachers say the outage has hampered their ability to keep track of kids exposed to COVID-19.

Under DOE policy, when a student tests positive, every classmate — often in in multiple classes — must be given rapid tests to take at home.

Because of the outage, “we had to manually figure out the kid’s schedule,” a Queens high-school teacher said “How many kids are falling through the cracks on getting the rapid tests?”

Grading is also impeded:  “I’m physically writing down their grades like it’s 2005 again,” the teacher said.

Leonie Haimson, an NYC co-chair of the national  Parent Coalition for Student Privacy said a breach  “would be terrible.”

“Teachers often use the system to record very sensitive information about a student’s emotional state or behavior, and to recommend counseling or other intervention services,” she said.

DOE spokeswoman Sarah Casasnovas said, “We’re in close communication with Illuminate Education as they investigate and have been informed that so far there is no confirmation any of our schools’ information was accessed or taken.” She said schools record official attendance and grades in DOE-run systems that “were not impacted by this incident.” 

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