January saw the arrival of the first letter. Another about former Louise Dean students followed in March. Then, on a Wednesday afternoon, May brought the kind of news that no parent wants to read: a threat actor was attempting to use the same data that PowerSchool claimed had been erased to extort school boards. Families in Calgary now perceive the breach as a slow leak that is never fully fixed rather than an event.
The Calgary Board of Education has been using PowerSchool, the student information system, for years if you haven’t been paying attention to the back-end software that powers your child’s report card. According to the CBE, it was selected because it satisfies Alberta’s provincial compliance standard, PASI. At the time, that list of approvals most likely sounded comforting. Until they don’t, most things do.
Although CBE was not informed until January 7, the breach actually occurred in late December 2024. In the end, PowerSchool acknowledged that it had paid a ransom in the hopes that the hackers would remove the stolen files. In retrospect, that kind of choice always seems worse. Security experts believe that paying only buys a pause and seldom ends the story. And now, months later, a new actor has surfaced the same data and is once more requesting payment. Nothing new has been accessed, according to PowerSchool. Families’ initial level of trust will likely determine whether or not they find that consoling.
The revelation about Louise Dean had a different impact. Social Insurance Numbers are not typically collected by CBE from students, although they were collected for the Foundational Learning Assistance program, which assisted students in finishing their education, according to records from the Louise Dean Center. It’s the kind of information that gets lost in a lengthy FAQ and is simple to overlook unless you know to look for it. A school record is not a SIN. A person’s number follows them throughout their life, and some of those numbers now belong to people who were teenagers when they gave them.
To its credit, PowerSchool extended the enrollment deadlines for identity protection and credit monitoring until the final week of July 2025. Experian offers identity protection for two years without requiring a credit card. Credit monitoring for employees and any students who have attained adulthood is handled by TransUnion. After July 30, the activation code, MPRT987RFK, will no longer function. It’s another matter entirely whether the majority of families have enrolled. Campaigns to raise awareness about credit monitoring typically end before the threat does.
The conversation among Calgary parents outside Chinook Centre and along Memorial Drive has changed from one of indignation to one of resignation, a weary acceptance that this is the current state of affairs. MyCBE and SchoolEngage are still used for school registration. Forms still need to be filled out. Life goes on. A more subdued concern, however, is that the data collected in December will continue to resurface in unexpected ways, be sold, leaked, or used as leverage for years to come. It’s difficult to ignore how frequently those most impacted by these breaches are also the ones with the least ability to stop them.
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