Earlier this month, the East Lansing Public Schools Board of Education approved a plan to join a class-action lawsuit against PowerSchool, a software and cloud-hosting platform used by the district that experienced a data breach in December 2024. Hackers claimed to have stolen the data of 62.4 million students and 9.5 million teachers.
Christian Palasty, the district’s director of technology and communications, explained in an interview with East Lansing Info that East Lansing students’ information was not stolen in the data breach because of extra security measures taken by the district.
PowerSchool stores all school records, including attendance, lunch counts, demographic data, grades, behavior reports and emergency contact information. Palasty said schools fall into one of two categories in their PowerSchool setup: districts that self-host the server on their own hardware and districts that have the platform hosted for them. The hack only affected schools that do not host their own servers…