DSBN investigating extent of privacy breach

District School Board of Niagara is hoping to hear from parents to determine the extent of a privacy breach at a Welland high school.

DSBN communications manager Kim Yielding said the school board is asking parents of students at Welland Centennial Secondary School to call 905-641-2929, ext. 54117, and leave a message if they received someone else’s private student information tucked into envelopes alongside their child’s report cards.

“Our first priority is to communicate with parents, which we did yesterday, to try to determine the extent of the breach, and also to give them some next steps,” she said.

Yielding said only students at Welland Centennial were affected by the error.

The board used an automated system to call the homes of all 800 students Thursday, after learning about the privacy breach.

“So far we have only heard from a handful of parents, and we want to talk to as many parents as we can.”

For that reason, the board is opening the school on Monday from 8:30 a.m. until about 5 p.m., “so we can be as available as possible.”

It will give parents an opportunity to speak to school administration, or drop off the documents that were sent in error.

Yielding said the error “seems to have occurred when they would have been compiling the packages for the summer mailing,” but the school board plans to do more research to determine precisely what went wrong.

“First and foremost, we really want to talk to parents. After we’ve done that and rectified the privacy breach, we’ll then go back and look at the process and find out where did the checks and balances fall down and how can we prevent this from happening again.”

Yielding said types of documents that were mailed in error vary from student to student.

“Some parents may have received their own child’s report card and literacy test results, but received another child’s time table. In other instances, it was another combination,” she said.

Yielding said it’s the first time a breach of that nature occurred during the decade she has worked for the DSBN, despite as many as 36,000 report cards being mailed out at a time.

“It’s something we take very seriously and we want parents to know how extremely sorry we are,” she said. “We will take steps to ensure that this will not happen again.”