Dylan Lopez Contreras sat waiting for a copy of his class schedule in a sunny fourth-floor room of his Bronx high school as his counselor walked in wearing a “Free Dylan” button attached to the strap of his messenger bag.

Dylan stood, and Hedin Bernard lifted Dylan’s more-than-6-foot frame off the floor in a tight bear hug.

It had been more than 10 months since Dylan set foot in ELLIS Preparatory Academy, a high school geared toward older, newly arrived immigrant students. The last time the two had seen each other, Dylan’s hair was dyed purple and just covered his ears. Now, it fell below the 21-year-old’s shoulders and the purple dye had faded to yellow.

Last May, in a Manhattan courthouse after his asylum hearing, making him the first known New York City public school student detained during President Donald Trump’s second term. The Venezuelan native became the public face of an , remaining in custody until .

After Dylan’s arrest, his mom Raiza’s . Ever since then, Bernard has, along with ELLIS founding Principal Norma Vega, led the school’s efforts to rally behind Dylan, which included helping to put Raiza in touch with lawyers and advocates, organizing a student letter-writing campaign, and supporting a fundraiser for the family. With Dylan’s return to ELLIS, they hope he can focus on “what will happen, not what did happen,” Vega said.

But the jubilation of Dylan’s return has been mixed with frequent reminders of the looming threat of immigration enforcement facing him and other ELLIS students.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, released Dylan while he awaits a decision on an appeal in his . An immigration judge , and the appeals process could take years, according to his lawyers from the New York Legal Assistance Group. But ICE has the ability to take him back into custody at any time and requires regular check-ins, his lawyers said.

Shortly after Bernard reunited with Dylan Tuesday morning, as Dylan scarfed down a donut and drank coffee poured from Bernard’s thermos, the counselor invited him to join a college trip that week.

ELLIS staffers believe that is the surest path out of poverty. The trip would visit three colleges in upstate New York.

Dylan glanced down at his leg, where a black ankle monitor had been attached as a condition of his release. With his travel restrictions, Dylan knew he likely couldn’t attend.

But that didn’t slow down the ELLIS staffers for long. Later that morning, Bernard asked a colleague to invite college representatives to ELLIS, so Dylan wouldn’t have to leave school to meet them.

Dylan’s detention still lingers

The swiftness of the changes over the past two weeks has been hard for Dylan to comprehend.

After months in Moshannon Valley Processing Center, a Western Pennsylvania detention facility, Dylan had , flanked by Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani, thanking his supporters in Spanish from under the blue brim of a New York Knicks hat.

He had been sleeping on a thin cot in a cell with more than 70 men. Now he was in his own bed, cuddled with his younger siblings, ages 8 and 10, who had asked to sleep next to him. And after losing about 30 pounds in detention because he often couldn’t stomach the food, Dylan had a phalanx of adults at ELLIS showering him with .

“It’s a big contrast, to go through so much mistreatment, and then come back to people who love and support you,” he said in Spanish.

Still, his thoughts drift back to a friend in detention nicknamed “El Mayor,” or the elder, who has already called Dylan to let him know how happy he was to hear about his release and to ask if he could use his public profile to advocate for the release of others. (Dylan did exactly that at his press conference.) As long as those men remain in detention, Moshannon Valley is “not going to feel very far away,” he said.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson denied that there were any problems with the conditions at Moshannon. “All detainees are provided with proper meals, water, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers,” the spokesperson said. “In fact, ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens.”

ELLIS staffers said reintegrating Dylan into school will mean helping him catch up on all he missed over the past 10 months while also processing the ongoing trauma of his detention.

While Dylan was incarcerated, his classmates ., prepared for or taken Regents exams they needed for graduation, and kept up with the guitar lessons Dylan enjoyed before his arrest.

Letters from his classmates helped sustain him as his detention stretched from days to months, and his optimism for a quick release faded. He watched new detainees — including grandparents and young kids — come and go while he remained locked up.

Dylan had no formal education in detention. But he was determined to do what he could to keep up with his English.

He practiced speaking with cellmates from places like China and the United Kingdom and to advocate for better treatment from the guards.

He devoured manga and Marvel comics donated by the advocacy group ROCC NYC, which played a critical role in supporting his family and keeping public attention on his case. He scoured an English dictionary from the facility’s library to learn new vocabulary but had no one to check his pronunciation. And he tried to read some classics, such as Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez.

When he returned to ELLIS last week, Vega stopped him in the hallway to hand him a gift from a staffer in her district office: a copy of Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” another classic Dylan had asked to read but couldn’t get a copy of.

Dylan, who had fled Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro’s repressive regime, had been , and spent 10 months in ICE custody, had said he wanted to understand Dante’s nine circles of hell.

ELLIS gears up to help Dylan adjust

Staffers at ELLIS are accustomed to helping students navigate all kinds of trauma, but they’d never had a student return from long-term incarceration, Bernard said.

Dylan’s counselors at ELLIS plan to refer him to a Spanish-speaking therapist through a mental health clinic located on the first floor of ELLIS’ building, Bernard said. And staffers will watch for any signs that he is struggling.

They’re also hoping to give Dylan chances to enjoy himself outside academic courses, though his ankle monitor is complicating those plans. His counselor enrolled Dylan in a swim class, but Dylan worried about getting the device wet.

Schools in New York are required to continue enrolling students through age 21, but state law doesn’t stop them from staying longer if the school agrees, Vega said.

ELLIS staffers don’t want to keep Dylan in high school longer than necessary but are encouraging him to stay for two years, so he can master English before applying to college.

In the meantime, he is eager to earn money to help his mom and siblings with rent. He hopes to take a bartending course so he can work at night without interfering with his school schedule.

Dylan worked long hours as a delivery driver before his arrest, and Bernard remains concerned about how long he’ll want to stay in school.

Staffers at ELLIS are working on finding him an internship that allows him to make money while learning new skills and burnishing his college resume.

Dylan said he’s willing to stay at ELLIS “as long as it takes.”

Dylan and ELLIS face an uncertain future

Dylan’s arrest, and the aggressive escalation in immigration enforcement it represented, cast a long shadow over ELLIS over the past 10 months, .

Students had begun to talk more openly about self-deportation. Pressure to abandon school for work grew as students confronted their diminished prospects for building a future in the U.S. And ELLIS’ enrollment, like that at immigrant-heavy schools across the city, has declined as border crossings slowed to a trickle.

Many of the ELLIS students who greeted Dylan Tuesday with tearful hugs and exclamations like “bienvenidos, loco!” (welcome back, crazy!) had endured their own brushes with immigration enforcement.

Dylan saw a friend whose mother was deported while he was in detention, leaving her without a way to pay rent or look after her toddler during school hours. Dylan’s is considering returning to Ecuador in part because of the fear of ICE. Another student saw Dylan’s ankle monitor and asked a staff member what the device did, adding that her dad had one too, Bernard said.

And when Dylan greeted two fellow Venezuelan students, one asked if he’d had to sleep on the floor — noting that’s where he’d slept after being detained while crossing the border. “I know the floor,” Dylan responded with a wry smile.

During lunch time, Dylan settled into a booth with friends and munched on mozzarella sticks. He had a newfound appreciation for school cafeteria food.

His friendships were what Dylan missed most about ELLIS, and there was lots to catch up on. The conversation soon turned to an ordinary high school concern: Dylan had to figure out what color to dye his hair next.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

New York City students with a passion for STEM — and an interest in artificial intelligence — may soon have a high school dedicated to training “the next generation of technology professionals.”

But families in Manhattan’s District 2 are pushing back against for , a new screened admissions high school that would take the place of the tiny, girls-only Urban Assembly School of Business for Young Women. Next Generation would be the first city public school to focus its curriculum on AI and computer science.

As details of the two proposals emerged over the last month, so have dual tensions: What should fill the space left by Young Women in Business, and how private technology companies and their artificial intelligence products could shape the curriculum at Next Generation.

Much of the opposition to Next Generation has come from families at a middle school also in the Broadway building, Lower Manhattan Community School. Also known as LMC, parents at the school have called on the department for years to expand enrollment from grades 6-8 up to grade 12.

The Panel for Educational Policy, the board that votes on new schools and closures, is expected to consider the proposals for Next Generation and Business for Young Women at its April 29 meeting.

The Education Department released both proposals on March 6, the day after the city’s eighth graders received their high school acceptance offers. If approved, Next Generation would welcome its first class of ninth graders in the fall. (The plan to close Business for Young Women in June is not contingent on Next Generation’s approval.)

Despite not having the green light yet, Next Generation has already held three virtual open houses. Its states the school is “set to open” in fall 2026, noting that applications would open March 19.

Parents ask: ‘Why this school and why here?’

Manhattan High Schools Superintendent Gary Beidleman introduced the idea for Next Generation Technology High School at a .

Panel for Educational Policy members and families of the three co-located schools at 26 Broadway — in addition to LMC and Business for Young Women, Richard R. Green High School of Teaching shares the building — said that meeting was the first time the district school community had been notified of the proposed STEM- and technology-focused screened high school.

At the Feb. 25 announcement, Beidleman said Next Generation grew out of his experience as a summer 2024 , and that Google and OpenAI are part of the planning team for the school. One of the school’s goals, he said, is to “expand pathways connected to high-growth technology careers” and provide advanced STEM and technology programming for NYC students. Next Generation also plans to offer a summer internship program with Carnegie Mellon University.

Caleb Haraguchi-Combs, founding principal and project director of Next Generation High School, said in an information session that the school would utilize . How much of this AI-powered, AI-focused Google coursework would comprise the curriculum is still in flux, according to the proposal’s .

The school’s academic description includes similar or identical language as found on the Google Skills website: Next Generation’s “special access to technology industry mentors,” “technology certifications,” and “curriculum that adapts to the dynamic changes in the technology field” are offerings advertised on the homepage of the Google Skills site.

Officials and families question new school proposal process

The community and Panel for Educational Policy members have asked questions about the fast proposal process, speaking to uncertainty around admissions for the coming school year.

in a letter to the Panel for Educational Policy that the proposal seemingly came out of nowhere, and families were not provided adequate engagement opportunities before its release. Panel Chair Greg Faulkner said he has received hundreds of similar letters from parents since the community learned of the incoming proposal in late February.

High school offers were released March 5, ahead of the panel’s vote and months before the proposed school would open. It remains unclear how the Education Department would handle screening requirements — such as interviews or assessments — after the main admissions cycle has concluded. The Office of District Planning did not respond to questions about how enrollment would work for this fall.

of the school, created by the Next Generation’s founding principal and program director on March 8, had under 100 signatures at the time of publishing.

A public hearing is scheduled for April 14, two weeks before the panel’s vote.

“I would love more transparency around why the department chooses certain schools to go in certain places,” said Sarah Calderon, a parent at Lower Manhattan Community School. “When we asked the superintendent, ‘Why this school and why here?’ he said he had no data on district demand.”

Beidelman told parents at the Feb. 25 District 2 meeting that expanding Lower Manhattan Community “was not an idea that was on the table.”

The Education Department receives many proposals each year, including some from outside New York City, said Sean Rux of the Office of New School Development.

“This was the proposal that spoke to us,” Rux said.

Families push to expand Lower Manhattan Community School

The plan to close the underenrolled Business for Young Women school has been percolating for a few years — with just 91 students this year, it’s the smallest district high school in the city, said Education Department officials.

Families at Lower Manhattan Community School say they have pushed for years to expand into a 6–12 model, and would like to move into the space used by Business for Young Women, if closed.

“A proposal to expand LMC could potentially open up sixth grade admissions to applicants citywide, but we have not been given the opportunity to even submit a proposal,” said Anne Hager, a parent of a sixth grader at Lower Manhattan School.

At a PTA meeting with Education Department staff on Wednesday, LMC’s Student Leadership Team presented its case to expand the school instead of opening Next Generation.

A new 6-12 would eliminate the need for LMC students to go through a second, onerous application process, something that students with disabilities would especially benefit from, they said. The presentation also cited Department of Education data from 2024 that showed 6-12 schools have nearly three times higher demand than their 6-8 middle school counterparts.

compared with citywide averages.

The department’s proposal focuses largely on space at the Broadway campus, estimating that Next Generation would serve roughly 450 students by its fourth year. All three schools can comfortably co-locate, according to the proposal, though its capacity calculations do not allot for significant expansion for either Richard R. Green High School or LMC.

Debate over AI timing and oversight

Next Generation’s proposal arrives amid over artificial intelligence in schools.

The school initially marketed itself in information sessions and on social media as an “AI school,” though DOE officials later clarified that students would learn about artificial intelligence rather than be taught by it.

“Students need to be creators, not consumers, of technology,” Beidleman said at the Feb. 25 meeting. “Lessons learned from the past show us that new tech in place creates an opportunity.”

Some parents have argued that broad use of an AI platform in public schools should not be allowed before comprehensive guidelines have been released by the city.

Greg Faulkner, who chairs the Panel for Educational Policy, said he first learned of the proposal after receiving Next Generation’s last month. Since then, the panel has received hundreds of letters from parents opposing the plan and raising concerns about the lack of community engagement so far.

“I have two major hesitations with this: We don’t know what kind of AI involvement there will be. The development team has not provided a playbook for how that will look,” Faulkner said. “And in reading the response letters from District 2 parents, I see that proper engagement and process was not done.”

At a District 2 town hall on March 5, Chancellor Kamar Samuels said the Education Department expects to release AI guidance in the coming weeks and will provide a 45-day window for community feedback once it’s published.

Five Community Education Councils have passed resolutions calling for a two-year moratorium on artificial intelligence use in schools. But calls for broad AI guidelines implemented at the city level are nothing new; of an AI-powered reading program in 2024 after former Comptroller Brad Lander called for a citywide playbook.

“I think the question of teacher capacity and teacher shortages, the research on kids and AI, is still nascent, and the DOE’s lack of its own AI policy leads me to question the timing of any AI school,” said Calderon, the parent at Lower Manhattan Community.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .Ěý

Therefore, the response begins at City Hall.   

Education leaders and equity advocates reject the idea that standing up for students and protecting funding are mutually exclusive. Both can and must be pursued. Every child in New York City deserves to feel safe, seen and supported in school. The new administration should be guided by that commitment. 

EdTrust-New York has expressed to work closely with the Mamdani administration to fulfill the long-standing promise of free, universal child care for children age two and under, as well as full access to Pre-K and 3-K. Families across the city still pay up to $26,000 annually for child care, and too many remain on waitlists.

Meeting this demand requires sustainable funding, additional child care sites, a well-paid workforce and full-day programs in neighborhoods where families live. Such investments would give all children a strong start. 

New York City must also confront the alarming reality that nearly half of fourth graders score below basic proficiency in reading, with even worse outcomes for Black and Latinx students. While initiatives like NYC Reads and NYC Solves mark progress, they need ongoing support and expansion.

EdTrust-New York encourages the Mamdani administration to continue expanding multilingual materials, provide interventions for English learners and students with disabilities, and ensure that all educators receive training in the science of reading. At the same time, the city should work toward developing a comprehensive adolescent literacy plan to support middle and high school students.

Mamdani’s leadership should reflect a deep commitment to a curriculum that honors the identities and experiences of all students. Fully implementing culturally responsive education means expanding Black, Native American, AAPI and Latin studies, as well as giving educators the training and tools needed to teach the curricula. The city’s schools also need greater investment in collective care teams, educators, counselors, nurses and social workers who can provide the academic and emotional support students need.

Segregation continues to divide New York City students by race and class. The incoming administration has an opportunity to take meaningful steps toward integration by encouraging all districts to create integration plans, using admissions models such as lottery. The city also needs to recruit and retain more educators of color and publicly report school integration data to track progress. 

The Mamdani administration should also protect and support immigrant students and multilingual learners, who face growing threats from federal policies and systemic barriers. Schools can strengthen scaffolds in literacy and math, expand bilingual curricula  and provide mental health services for students facing trauma.

In addition, older immigrant students should have access to the full high school experience, not just for language acquisition or diploma-completion programs. Higher education partners can also play a vital role also by expanding financial aid and creating safe, supportive pathways for undocumented students to attend and graduate from college. 

Improving school climate is another key priority, particularly the need to shift from exclusion and punishment to belonging and support. With more than a third of students chronically absent — especially Black, Latino, and those from low-income backgrounds — and many affected by punitive discipline, the city can invest in restorative justice and mental health programs.

That should include funding restorative initiatives in all schools, training educators in healing-centered approaches and increasing weighted funding for the most-affected student groups. 

Under mayoral control, New York City has achieved important system-wide progress, such as the expansion of universal pre-K and the launch of NYC Reads. Mamdani should maintain this structure but ensure stronger accountability and input from parents and students. He can build on this success by ensuring that parents, students and caregivers, who should be granted voting power on Community Education Councils, have meaningful influence over district policy decisions. 

Finally, the Mamdani administration should expand access to college and career pathways. Too few students can enroll in college in high school programs that boost college success. Let’s expand these programs citywide, closing access gaps and strengthening support in college. That should include proven initiatives like CUNY’s ASAP and ACE, which help students persist and graduate despite financial emergencies. 

As Mayor-elect Mamdani prepares to lead the nation’s largest school system, he inherits both profound challenges and enormous opportunities. This moment offers a shared chance to build a public education system that not only aspires to equity but truly delivers on that promise. 

New York City’s 2024-25 school calendar was set more than a year ago.

But the Education Department made a scheduling error for this week’s Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha and didn’t communicate about it until Tuesday morning, frustrating some principals as the school year entered the June homestretch.

New York City schools faced a particularly strange week: All schools are closed on Thursday for Eid al-adha/Anniversary Day. On Friday, though 6-12 and high schools are open, elementary and middle schools are closed to students while their staffers were expected to show up for a “clerical” day.

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Schools typically use the day for grading and collaborating on planning for the year ahead. They often use the time to take tech inventory or address other classroom housekeeping issues. Some schools schedule kindergarten or sixth-grade student orientations and tours.

But in Tuesday’s weekly email from the Education Department to principals, amid a litany of other news, officials included a brief note that Friday would not be an in-person staff day as planned because of Eid. The holiday starts Thursday evening and goes into Friday. Several principals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, expressed annoyance at the last-minute change, questioning why it had not been communicated earlier or in a direct and transparent manner with officials owning up to their mistake.

One Manhattan elementary school principal wondered whether the Education Department failed to understand when the Muslim holiday began. The observance of the holiday is dependent on moon sightings, and it can shift year-to-year, officials said.

“The change was made to provide greater flexibility for educators to complete various end-of-year tasks,” Education Department spokesperson Chyann Tull said in a statement. “We are working closely with school leaders to support them in adjusting plans as needed.”

Students in grades 6-12 schools who need to be absent, late or depart early for observance of Eid may be excused, Education Department officials said.

“We had already planned a full day, including an in-person orientation for our incoming sixth graders,” said one Manhattan middle school principal, who scrambled on Tuesday to find teachers willing to volunteer to come in person to avoid canceling the orientation while also reworking the other staff activities for the day.

“Most of what we planned won’t translate to remote, or at least won’t translate without significant changes,” the principal said.

A Brooklyn middle school principal echoed similar concerns.

“We had a planned-out day dedicated to June-planning on teams and class list-making,” the principal said. “While that can technically happen remotely, it will greatly diminish productivity and actual preparedness for the close of the year and the start of next year. It’s a real shame.”

Some school leaders, however, were pleased with the change — even if they were critical of the way it was communicated.

“I think the impact is relieved happiness overall and for some staff members who are observing Eid, overall relief,” one Bronx assistant principal said. “I anticipated this was going to be a low staff attendance day anyway.”

This isn’t the first time New York City schools made a last-minute pivot to remote on this particular day. Two years ago, for staffers on clerical day as well as students in schools that run from grades 6-12.

“But that was an external and last-minute thing due to an emergency,” one Manhattan elementary school principal said, unlike this year’s switcheroo.

Another Manhattan elementary principal recalled having to cancel a kindergarten orientation that day of the wildfires — and having to do damage control the entire next year for the parents who were still upset over not being able to have an in-person tour. That principal no longer uses that day for orientations, but was still scrambling on Tuesday to come up with a Plan B for school staffers, including office staff, whose work is harder to do remotely.

“The last-minute scramble and the gaps in communication — it’s a frustrating pattern that has happened over multiple chancellors,” the principal said. “It’s a whole ripple effect.”

Many principals were pleased, however, that the Education Department has already addressed an issue with next year’s calendar, so there isn’t a .

“This isn’t the biggest thing, but it just doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence,” the Manhattan middle school principal said of this week’s last-minute change. “On the positive side, they did take away Jan. 2… but at least with that one there is plenty of advance warning so everyone can plan accordingly.”

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

After ChatGPT exploded in popularity, New York City’s public school system quickly , arguing it couldn’t help students build critical thinking skills and often spouts misinformation.

Nearly two years later, during his annual “State of Our Schools” speech on Tuesday, schools Chancellor David Banks completed his about-face on artificial intelligence. The school system should get ready to inject the technology into nearly every aspect of its operations, from teaching and learning to transportation and enrollment, he said.

The schools chief laid out an expansive vision that includes customized college advising, instant assessments of student work, personalized instruction, and even replacing annual standardized tests.

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“AI can revolutionize how we function as a school system,” Banks told the audience of administrators, elected officials, and union leaders at Frank Sinatra School of the Arts High School in Queens as he outlined his plans for the nation’s largest school system.

Still, Banks acknowledged that the Education Department has no concrete plans, timelines, or cost estimates for those AI projects. The goal is to signal to AI companies that the school system is interested in their technology and wants to hear ideas, he said, adding that officials are convening an advisory council next month to help brainstorm.

Aside from his embrace of AI, the most significant announcement from Banks on Tuesday was a plan to open a new high school in southeast Queens next fall, called HBCU Early College Prep, that will have strong ties to historically Black colleges and universities.

Banks’ annual speech otherwise stuck to promoting initiatives that he has been building since taking office in 2022. He noted that his is rolling out to all elementary schools this fall. He vowed to , an initiative in 135 high schools that gives students access to coursework geared toward specific industries and paid internships.

And he noted the city is adding to its library of curriculums focused on underrepresented groups called The city recently launched materials devoted to people with disabilities, and Banks said the department will offer lessons focused on the Latino community soon.

Though Mayor Eric Adams attended the speech, he did not offer any remarks — a break from the previous year. Adams and several senior members of his administration have been . Earlier this month, federal agents searched homes or seized electronic devices from Banks, his two brothers, and his romantic partner, First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright.

Asked about Adams’ lack of a speaking role during the event, Banks declined to comment.

Here are three takeaways from the chancellor’s speech:

Banks thinks AI will become pervasive in the city’s schools

Banks sketched out a few ways he thinks the technology can significantly change the way schools operate. He said the systems could “give teachers a daily, accurate, and comprehensive picture of a child’s progress” based on homework assignments, exams, and other student work.

AI tools could also offer “personalized learning plans for every child” alongside extra instruction based on those plans. The idea, Banks said, is to make it easier for teachers to reach students at a range of academic levels who are all in the same classroom. Still, some previous efforts to promote personalized learning, including by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, .

The technology could also provide students with more comprehensive college and career counseling, Banks suggested, drawing on information like employment outcomes at different schools. An Education Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to a question about whether there are any real-world examples of the technology being used in the ways Banks described.

Asked about the technology’s limitations, , Banks acknowledged it is “not fully baked yet,” but “I wouldn’t be overly concerned about some of the early missteps.”

The schools chief also sought to calm fears about the technology.

“AI will never be able to replace the personal connection that a teacher provides,” he said. “We’re not displacing human beings.”

A new high school is coming to Queens

On the heels of opening two new Bard Early College campuses in Brooklyn and the Bronx, officials said they’re planning to open a third “accelerated” high school this fall in Queens — HBCU Early College Prep.

Officials have previously said opening new campuses is part of a bid to keep families in the city’s public schools, which have seen enrollment drop 9% over the past five years.

The campus will partner with Delaware State University, a historically Black college, and will give students a chance to earn an associate degree before leaving high school.

“They’re also going to be immersed in the history and culture of multiple HBCUs across the country through college visits, the opportunity to study abroad, and research opportunities,” Banks said, adding that there will be “synchronous instruction from professors, alumni, mentors and more.”

Education Department officials said the school will be screened and will give priority to Queens residents.

Spinning up schools that serve specific student populations is in Banks’ wheelhouse. Before becoming chancellor, , a network of public schools geared toward serving young men of color. At the conclusion of his speech on Tuesday, Banks led the crowd in a recitation of the poem Invictus by William Ernest Henley, a at Eagle.

Tweaks to career-focused learning efforts

City officials are making some tweaks to its FutureReadyNYC initiative, which gives students access to career-connected learning opportunities. Participating schools will be able to add new “industry focus areas” in social work and decarbonization.

That builds on existing tracks in business, education, technology, and health care.

Banks touted a plan to launch a new high school, Northwell School of Health Sciences, that is designed to prepare students for careers in the health care industry. The school is supported with nearly $25 million from Bloomberg Philanthropies, which Banks said is the single largest grant the school system has ever received. (Chalkbeat from Bloomberg.)

The chancellor also announced that Mount Sinai Health System will help support the city’s career education efforts.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at

The boy is dyslexic and has a disorder that prevents his eyes from working together — a combination that requires intensive and specialized therapy and instruction. Since kindergarten, Garcia has toted medical records and other documentation of Vincent’s needs to meeting after meeting. But the district never found him an appropriate school, so eventually Garcia did that herself. 

Now, here was an anonymous auditor confirming that despite a fistful of favorable decisions from the people who preside over special education disputes — known as independent hearing officers — the district had all but entirely failed to reimburse her thousands of dollars for Vincent’s private school tuition. 

Garcia, whose name and the name of her son have been changed to protect the child’s privacy, says that at first she thought the email was fake. “It was the first time anybody ever said anything that had happened was wrong,” she says. “Everyone up until then had just been like, ‘Oh, well.’ ”

She felt a glimmer of optimism, Garcia says, but also steeled for it to be one more episode of false hope.

Special education is notoriously fraught in many school systems, but the magnitude of the problem in the nation’s largest district, New York City, boggles. The department is supposed to educate nearly a quarter of a million children with disabilities — a population that in 2019 was larger than the entire student body of all but seven U.S. school districts. In 2020-21, nearly 21% of New York City’s schoolchildren received special education services, compared to a national average of 15%. 

By all accounts, the Department of Education every year fails to meet even basic obligations to tens of thousands of children with disabilities. Stretching back two decades, numerous lawsuits and have flagged the same problems over and over. Just this week, it was — or close to 37% of NYC preschoolers with disabilities — did not receive all of their required services, and in March, it was revealed that did not.

Because very little has changed, parents are forced — typically after years of neglect — to seek out everything from specialized instruction to intensive therapies on their own. They and their service providers are entitled to reimbursement.

The Garcias are just one of thousands of families stuck in a narrow Sisyphean outgrowth of the dysfunction. Even with fat files of documentation and legal orders in their favor, they can’t get the department to actually cut the requisite checks. The more families who, denied services, flood into the due process system, the more bogged down it gets.

Currently, there are who won their cases in front of an independent hearing officer only to have the Department of Education fail to comply with the resulting decisions. 

The NYC Department of Education did not respond to ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ’s multiple requests for comment for this story. Lawyers and advocates who have followed the district’s attempts to improve its due process pipeline say it recently has added staff in an effort to clear the backlog, but basic failings persist.

The system was already at a standstill, say critics. But now, whose confirmed or suspected disabilities went unevaluated and unserved during the pandemic threatens to overwhelm it completely. The department struggles to find, heat and cool, and staff enough rooms to hear waiting families’ cases, much less process their reimbursements.

Vincent was years from being born when a court first ordered the district to revamp its handling of the hearing officers’ orders. In 2003, a nonprofit that works on behalf of disadvantaged NYC children, filed a class-action lawsuit, L.V. v Department of Education, over the problems with the hearing officer system. The suit originally encompassed nine students and now includes the thousands who are essentially in the same predicament as Vincent.

“All I can say is that I have been doing this since 2012 and there’s a new problem every year,” says Bonnie Spiro Schinagle, the special education attorney who represents Garcia. “It doesn’t seem like anyone has really put organized thought into this, identified problems, identified solutions and then figured out a pathway to implementing them. They just haven’t.” 

The litigation was supposed to force the DOE to begin complying more promptly with orders issued by hearing officers. There has been little progress though and in March, a special master — a court-appointed overseer tasked with tracking the district’s compliance — issued a 127-page report containing 75 recommendations and a warning: The overhaul still would take years to complete. 

Unstopping the bottleneck will require such wholesale transformations, the report says, as the department moving a process that now often involves handwritten documents online and making itself a more attractive, competitive employer — not just to the special educators and therapists who are in desperately short supply — but to the administrative staff who process hearing orders and invoices.

It’s the latest in a to impose timeliness, responsiveness and efficacy on a system with a protracted history of being resistant to all three.

‘The reality is people have been waiting for years’

Garcia knew very little of this context when she received the December email that seemed too good to be true. The auditor, whose appointment was part of the 20-year-old class-action lawsuit, suggested that she ask her attorney to file a federal lawsuit. The email included an attachment the auditor said would serve as evidence substantiating her claim. Garcia called Spiro Schinagle, who said she was already preparing civil complaints for a number of families who had received similar emails. The lawyer added the Garcias to her list.

Well-worn federal civil rights law is clear regarding situations like theirs: If a school system can’t serve a child with disabilities, it must pay for a program that can. Vincent’s mother enrolled him at a private school in Queens serving a small number of children with learning disabilities like her son’s.

His tuition changes from year to year, but has hovered around $44,000 a year, according to court documents. If that sounds steep, it includes the cost of services school districts frequently struggle to provide in a cost-effective manner.

So far, in each school year the family has been forced to pay some or all of the tuition, pending a response from the DOE bureaucracy. Not including the 2022-23 school year, the Garcias are owed at least $27,324, plus attorney fees, according to court filings 

As the U.S. Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act requires, the district is supposed to serve children who need special education services along a continuum ranging from individualized help in a regular classroom to the kind of specialized placement Vincent requires. NYC students whose needs can’t be met in a typical school are often referred to District 75, a portfolio of separate DOE schools created to offer more intensive support. 

When there is a disagreement about a student’s proposed Individualized Education Program — the legal document spelling out their required services — the dispute goes . An impartial hearing officer — someone trained and paid by New York state — must be assigned within two days and the case heard in two weeks or less. 

The entire process should take no more than 75 days. But Garcia’s experience of having it drag on is common. 

“The reality is that people have been waiting for years to get the orders to get the services their children need,” says Rebecca Shore, director of litigation at Advocates for Children. “It’s not an issue of resources being available. It’s an issue of kids getting the services they need.”

Advocates and attorneys who represent special education families in New York City are quick to assert that the bottleneck — getting the DOE to comply with orders issued as the result of a single type of due process hearing — is a symptom of the much bigger problem. 

In 1979, a group of families , alleging that it failed to obey federal laws requiring the evaluation of all children with suspected disabilities and to provide them with appropriate services. Because the system has never been able to keep up with the need, pressure from that lawsuit resulted in a decision ordering the district to pay for a private school for the children it can’t serve. 

One outcome, according to Michael Rebell, a professor and the executive director of the Center for Educational Equity at Columbia University’s Teachers College, has been enough demand to fuel the creation of a large number of private schools offering specialized programs for children with disabilities.

“Because we have this gargantuan system, for years the department has had problems hiring enough teachers and offering enough programs,” he says. “There’s a paucity of services. And there’s also a large number of middle-class families who would prefer their kids go to private schools.” 

Recognizing that indeed some parents might try to game the system, the rules say families must prove to an independent hearing officer that the district has left them no alternative. Unless the department appeals and wins, the hearing officer’s decision goes into effect. 

There are two massive, resulting problems: A backlog of cases needing to be heard and the department’s inability to pay the parents, schools and providers who the hearing officers determine are owed money. 

In 2007, Advocates for Children and the department settled L.V., which took aim only at the issues involving the hearing officer process, with the district agreeing to take a series of steps to speed things up. For the next decade-plus, an outside auditor — the same progress monitor who flagged the Garcias’ numerous unfulfilled hearing orders — periodically to the court. 

Twelve years later, with her son entering third grade and three years of fruitless attempts to secure an accurate diagnosis and an appropriate school placement for him, Garcia asked for her first impartial hearing. She would leave one frustrating part of the special education system only to enter another.

For Garcia, the last straw

From kindergarten through second grade, Vincent bounced from school to school. Like lots of bright kids who struggle to read, he was initially dismissed as lazy, his mother says. 

“He’s always been able to participate verbally and in presentations, but not able to read a paragraph,” recalls Garcia. “People kept telling me, ‘Oh, he’s not trying hard enough. He’s so articulate.’”

The boy confounded the evaluators, his mother said. The first time Garcia had him assessed, the psychologist doing the testing came out to the waiting room to say she was ending the session because Vincent could not stop crying. “She’s like, ‘This isn’t good for him.’”

He was diagnosed as dyslexic, but it quickly became apparent that specialized literacy instruction wasn’t enough to address his needs, says Garcia. Extensive testing revealed that despite 20/20 vision with glasses, Vincent was literally not seeing the right letters in the right sequence. 

He had a condition called , which means his eyes do not track the same things. Because of this, he literally could not see lines of text. Letters appeared out of sequence and above or below the line. 

His eyes needed training to work together, rather than presenting him with different, jumbled images. And he needed assistive technology — chiefly simple text-to-speech apps — to make sense of written words. 

In response, his mother said the district placed Vincent in a school it operates for children with intellectual impairments, such as Down’s and Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. The program sent him back, pointing out that the DOE had misclassified the boy, placing him in a category of student the school did not serve.

But despite several months of back and forth over whether the district would accept its own diagnoses and come up with what it thought was an appropriate school, nothing happened.

For Garcia, it was the last straw. That’s when she hired her attorney, Spiro Schinagle, and started the process of having Vincent referred to a private school. In January 2020, the family sent the city education department saying that, because the district had failed to offer the child an appropriate placement, they were enrolling him in the Queens school they had found themselves. 

At a cost of almost $21,000 for the spring semester — which Garcia, who works for another part of the NYC schools, paid from savings — Vincent spent the rest of the year starting to catch up at his new school. In May 2020, an independent hearing officer ordered the district to reimburse the family. But it wasn’t until this spring that Garcia got reimbursed for the 2019-20 school year.

With the district failing to come up with an alternative, Vincent has remained at the private school ever since. Each year, Garcia has had to demand a new impartial hearing and then wait months for it to take place. After every favorable decision, the family waits for the district to comply with the new order.

In August 2021, facing the prospect of fronting more tuition payments, Garcia agreed to a $12,500 settlement for the 2020-21 academic year — money she has yet to see.

As the orders requiring the district to pay stacked up, Vincent was placed in a category where the city was no longer disputing his placement and now owed the tuition money directly to his school. It’s unclear from court documents how much of that money the school has been paid. The school did not respond to a request for comment.

The advent of the 2021-22 school year meant the opening of yet another case. This round took until mid-April for the hearing officer to issue an order obligating the district to pay — directly to the school this time — for the year that was then about to conclude. In turn, Garcia said the school was supposed to reimburse her $4,400 she had gone ahead and paid, but said it could not because the district did not supply the school with some required paperwork. 

“They knew that this child belonged in this particular school,” says Spiro Schinagle. “And the district time and time again refused to listen to its own [evaluator]…. So the parent had to lay out money year after year, and had to retain me, year after year, and go to a hearing, year after year. That, in and of itself, is outrageous.” 

‘The goal of this lawsuit was to change the system’

The bottleneck that’s trapped the Garcia family is growing, according to of the . In November 2021, it reported, there were more than 16,000 pending impartial hearing cases, a 34% increase from the year before. Some 9,000 cases had not even been assigned to a hearing officer. 

New York City, a separate analysis found, is responsible for 96% of all of the impartial hearings requested in the state. The number of pending cases had not budged by January 2022. Attorneys and advocates predict that the COVID backlog will further overwhelm the system, as the parents of children who may not have gotten needed therapies for years file cases. 

The council’s summary of the problems is straightforward: Because families still aren’t getting the services their children are entitled to, cases continue to be filed. Beyond that, there are not enough hearing officers and those that exist get delayed pay. 

Some officers have untenable caseloads; one had a docket of pending cases, as of January 2022. The Brooklyn facility where the hearings are held has no heat or air conditioning and no waiting areas or photocopiers. 

The “next steps” identified by the special master hint at how far from resolution those basic problems may be. The department, its report to the court suggests, should form a steering committee and appoint people to oversee “the areas of people, process and technology.”

Two pages of acronyms for various parts of the DOE bureaucracy precede 75 recommendations ranging from figuring out how to put accounts payable online so outside service providers can get paid to streamlining onerous civil service rules that complicate hiring enough people to handle the payments. 

The document is in fact so complicated that Advocates for Children, which represents the plaintiffs in the 20-year-old case, translated those recommendations it agrees with into plain English and put them onto a simple chart along with suggested timelines for implementation. 

The judge must now decide which recommendations to adopt, and how to hold the department accountable for progress. There is no deadline for that decision.

“We need this to happen in an expeditious manner,” says Shore, Advocates for Children’s litigation director. “The goal of this lawsuit was to change the system so that families whose children were not getting services could get their needs met.”

As it stands, Spiro Schinagle says, the amount the district is spending to pay for due process proceedings just continues to climb. “I don’t know how much it would cost to really assess different categories of kids who really need to be served and to put together credible programs,” she says. “They’re hemorrhaging money… that they could have been spending on all sorts of things.” 

The ongoing wrangling over the class-action suit isn’t likely to help the Garcias anytime soon. Vincent’s 2022-23 academic year started the same way as the three before it: with the DOE not paying its bills. 

With the auditor’s email as evidence, the family’s lawsuit finally seemed to get the district’s attention. In May, the DOE emailed Spiro Schinagle a document agreeing to pay the school directly for the academic year that just finished and to pay for Vincent to return in the fall. 

Garcia says she is still waiting on reimbursement for the settlement she agreed to for the money she laid out for the boy’s fourth-grade tuition, as well as some other payments. If the district pays everything she is owed, Spiro Schinagle says she will withdraw the lawsuit.

Meanwhile, Vincent is thriving, his mother said. He started at his new school at age 8 reading at a kindergarten level and, now finishing sixth grade, has mastered third-grade literacy. He gets occupational therapy for his eyes at school, which means he and his mother no longer have to make a weekly trip to Manhattan from the Bronx for private care. 

Far from being lazy, as his past teachers suggested, Vincent works hard, his mother says, diligently doing his homework and signing himself up to be in the school play and serve on the student council. 

“He’s thriving. He has friends,” Garcia says. “His school loves him.”

Now it appears that district technology leaders have applied that logic to computer hacks. That’s according to Doug Levin, the national director of The , who has spent years chronicling computer hacks on school districts and education technology vendors. Data breaches are a significant and growing threat to schools, he said, yet many district IT officials are hesitant to discuss them. 

“Quietly they might confess that this is an issue they lose a lot of sleep over, but they never talk about it publicly, often for fear of looking bad,” said Levin, whose nonprofit group provides threat intelligence to school districts to protect them from emerging cybersecurity risks. 

Now, an increasing number of school districts have been forced to notify students and parents that they’ve been duped. In March, New York City Public Schools, the country’s largest district, disclosed that the had been exposed online. The data breach, the largest such incident against a single school district in U.S. history, has since reached far beyond the five boroughs. Other school districts — California, Colorado, Connecticut, Oklahoma and New York — have since acknowledged being victims. 

At the center of the debacle is that helps more than 5,200 school districts track student attendance and grades, among other metrics. Students’ personal information, some of it sensitive, was exposed when hackers breached Illuminate’s servers in January. students’ names, birth dates, class schedules, behavioral records and whether they qualify for special education or free or reduced-price lunches. 

Yet months later, many key details — including the number of districts affected — remain unknown. The company did not respond to requests for comment from ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. 

In New York, state education officials into Illuminate, which city officials accused of misrepresenting its security safeguards. 

To gain a better understanding of the hack, ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ caught up with Levin to discuss how the high-profile data breach occurred, why many critical pieces of information remain elusive and strategies that parents and students can use to protect themselves online. 

The interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, was conducted prior to the latest development on the school cybersecurity beat: Friday that the personal information of more than half a million students and staff was compromised in a ransomware attack on education technology vendor Battelle for Kids. The data breach was carried out on December 1 and Battelle notified Chicago officials about the attack about a month ago, on April 26. 

ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ: The Illuminate Education data breach is the largest known hack of K-12 student records in history? 

Doug Levin: The Illuminate Education security incident — we actually don’t know much about what happened — was the single-largest data breach incident affecting a single school district. We still have to see what the numbers bear out for Illuminate Education, and it could still grow significantly in size.  

But a couple of years ago of their AIMSweb product. They never disclosed the total number of districts that were affected, but they said that 13,000 of their customers were affected. In fact, the Securities and Exchange Commission about the scope of the incident. A number of years ago, the education company Edmodo also endured a massive breach. 

So there are some large incidents that have happened but the more we learn about the Illuminate Education breach, the worse it does appear to be.

What sets this hack apart from previous incidents? 

Some education vendors don’t know a whole lot about the students they’re serving. They may have a student ID, they may know their grades or academic performance in one subject, but not a lot else about that student or their context. The Illuminate Education breach did involve a pretty large swath of sensitive information about students that could be used by criminals to commit identity theft and credit fraud against students. 

So that sets it apart. 

Unfortunately, it’s the latest and the most high-profile student data breach that is occurring not directly by school districts but by their vendors and partners. A lot of times the security conversation has been focused on the practices of schools themselves and attacks that have targeted schools. There have been a number of high-profile ransomware attacks that have brought school districts to a halt, , and . Those are very eye-opening incidents and they draw a lot of attention, but they are localized in their impact. They are very significant for those communities, but they only affect those communities. 

When a vendor experiences an incident, the impact and the scope of that breach can be massive. If you think about the vendors and suppliers that school districts work with, whether they’re for-profit, nonprofit, or even the state education agencies themselves, if they experience an incident, the scope and magnitude of that incident is likely to be significantly larger. 

There’s sort of this idiosyncratic issue in K-12 education where we have been laser focused on issues of student data privacy and a majority of states have now passed new student data privacy regulations in the last five to 10 years largely because the federal law, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, has not been updated since 1974.

But if we only look at this issue through the lens of student data privacy, it is like we have horse blinders on, we are not seeing the full picture. And while ensuring student data privacy is critically important, these are not security laws and they do not adequately address the various ways that unauthorized users can gain access to student data. 

In fact, vendors and partners are the most frequent cause of school district data breaches. 

This is an era where we need to broaden our lens from student data privacy exclusively to also include security. School districts themselves need to do more due diligence with respect to vendors’ security practices and in making sure they have contractual requirements in place that require the prompt notification and remediation of issues. 

With Illuminate Education, it has taken several months for individuals who were affected to find that out. The gap between when the company first learned about the incident and when parents are informed of the incident so they can take steps to protect their children is really too long. We really need to work on tightening that timeframe to protect students from the risks that we are introducing to them. 

We don’t know a lot about the scope of the Illuminate Education data breach. How would you describe the company’s overall response? Why does so much remain unclear? 

Frankly, it comes down to the state of policy and regulations. In the vast majority of cases, when an incident is experienced by an organization, whether it be by a school district or a partner, one of the first things they will do is look to see what they’re obligated to report under the law. 

So setting aside the ethical or moral desire and need to help individuals take steps to protect themselves when you have been at fault in causing an incident, many will look to what they are strictly required to do. And the fact of the matter is that there are many, many loopholes in existing notification laws. 

Organizations do not want to share bad news with their customers and stakeholders, and so there are reasons that people don’t like to disclose these things. But there’s also a compelling number of reasons why stakeholders deserve and need to know.

If hacks are not publicly disclosed, policymakers won’t understand the scope of the issue and they can’t take steps to provide more resources to protect against these sorts of threats. That’s exactly the sort of issue we’ve had in K-12. For years, no one talked about the incidents that schools were experiencing, so people thought that schools really weren’t experiencing incidents. That was simply not the case. 

Secondly, threat actors that attack schools and their vendors repeat their tactics in predictable ways. If they’re successful at attacking one school district, they will use those exact same tools and techniques against other school districts. So it’s important that organizations share with them a heads-up so that they can take the steps to protect themselves from being compromised in the same ways. 

With hacks, there is the potential for people to experience real harms. They can have their identity stolen, tax fraud, credit fraud, they could be embarrassed. They could have things disclosed about them — whether it’s their health status, their legal status, their immigration status — that were never supposed to be public and that may lead to very serious repercussions. 

There really is a moral obligation for people to disclose these incidents. 

You’ve observed a recent uptick in ransomware attacks. How do districts generally respond to these incidents? 

How school districts respond really depends on how proactive they have been in defending against cybersecurity risks. In the best cases, school districts have segmented their networks and made it difficult for that ransomware to spread throughout the district. In those cases, school districts are often able to restore their systems from backups, avoid paying extortion demands, investigate how the ransomware got into their system and plug those holes. 

In recent years, ransomware actors have also exfiltrated large amounts of student and staff data before they encrypt and lock those school district computers and demand a ransom. And I should note those ransom demands have been increasing dramatically for K-12 schools. In 2015 or 2016, you might have seen a ransomware demand of $5,000 to $10,000, payable in a cryptocurrency, of course. Today, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a ransomware demand of a million dollars or more being made to a school district.

When school districts are in that place, they’re really between a rock and a hard place at that point. If ransomware spreads across their system, those are the sorts of incidents that close schools for days and kids are sent home. 

In those cases, they rely on experts to come in and assess how to rebuild their systems., how to evict ransomware actors from their networks, how to handle the fact that ransomware actors have exfiltrated data already, and to reduce instances where schools have to pay those extortion demands. 

Law enforcement will never encourage a victim to pay that extortion demand. Every time a school district does so, they are really just encouraging future threat actors to target school districts with the same sort of techniques. 

Even school districts that don’t pay extortion demand face remediation and recovery costs. In Baltimore County, the recovery and remediation costs have been estimated in the millions of dollars, so you’re paying for the cost of ransomware incidents whether you pay that extortion demand or not. 

School districts are not exactly flush with cash. Why are schools a good target for hackers? Why are they particularly vulnerable?

I have often heard schools be very surprised when they’re attacked. They’re morally outraged because they’re an institution that is just trying to help kids and they’re being targeted by these criminals. 

But you made the statement that schools don’t have a lot of money and I actually want to push back on that. School districts actually manage quite a bit of money every year. They maintain facilities, transportation and food services. They may be the largest employer in many communities. 

It is correct, of course, that school districts don’t have enough money to do all the things they would like to do and need to do for kids. I’m not arguing that they are sufficiently funded. But it is not unusual for a school district of medium or large size to have an annual budget in the hundred of millions, and some of the largest districts in the country have annual budgets in the billions. That’s plenty of money to attract the attention of threat actors. 

Other than money, school districts and other government agencies have been disproportionately attacked largely because they tend to run IT systems that are older and they also tend to be under-resourced with respect to cybersecurity. They just don’t have the money and the capacity to hire experts in the way that we would hope and certainly not in the way that some private sector organizations do. 

And given that public sector organizations like school districts provide essential services and people get very upset if they’re disrupted, they may be susceptible to extortion tactics like ransomware. They also hold a lot of valuable information about those stakeholders that can be repurposed for criminal purposes. It really is a perfect storm here of school districts being, unfortunately, low-hanging fruit for criminals at a time where, as a policy issue, cybersecurity really has not been a priority. 

I think this is changing. There are conversations underway in both state legislatures and in Congress looking to provide more resources to school districts for cybersecurity. But this is a marathon not a sprint and, you know, that help has not yet arrived. 

What needs to happen legislatively in regards to school district hacks? 

There is a need for mandatory reporting. It is very difficult for anyone to get a handle on this issue and how to help schools protect themselves if we don’t know the scope of the issues that schools are facing. 

We certainly can’t bring those parties who are responsible to bear unless we get details about those sorts of incidents. 

Secondly, there is no floor, there is no minimum cybersecurity risk management practice in a school district. Parents, employees and taxpayers have reasonable assumptions about how school districts protect themselves from ransomware, data breaches and targeted phishing attacks. Yet I think they may be surprised that their expectations are not being met. Setting a minimum cybersecurity expectation on school districts is a common sense step that we can take, and those protections should also be extended to vendors. 

You built a map to track every K-12 data breach since 2016. What key trends and takeaways have you observed? 

The majority of those incidents involve student data but a significant minority involve school employee data, including teachers.

A variety of actors are responsible for these incidents. About a quarter are carried out by online criminals targeting school districts, but many are actually the result of the actions of insiders to the schools themselves. Like any large organization, employees make mistakes. School districts may email sensitive data to the wrong people, and very occasionally, school districts have disgruntled employees who do things on their way out the door. 

The last group of insiders are the students themselves. An IT leader joked with me once that every school district serving middle and high school students is getting free penetration testing whether they like it or not. The fact of the matter is that a proportion of students are very tech savvy and they do get bored. Kids being kids, they turn their attention to school districts themselves and, in fact, there have been some very large and significant data breaches because students themselves have compromised school district IT systems. 

What do students typically do when they compromise school technology? 

It depends on the incident. In some cases, they’re seeking to change their grades or their attendance records in a very similar vein to the . Some kids have even been enterprising and charged their fellow students for the privilege of changing their grades. 

But in other cases, they’re simply curious or are interested in making some kind of a statement and are interested in defacing a school website, a school social media account, blasting out emails that they think are funny. 

We don’t have any evidence that kids are monetizing their attacks on school districts on the dark web in the way that online criminals do. But having said that, there are a number of cases where students have crossed the line and have gotten entangled with law enforcement because the attacks they’ve carried out against school districts have been so disruptive. 

What do we know about the online criminals who target school districts? Who are they, in what cases have they been caught and in what cases have they faced any repercussions? 

Cybersecurity attacks have a unique characteristic to them because they can be carried out by individuals anywhere in the world at any time. By and large, the online criminals that are targeting school districts are based overseas and they are based in countries that make it difficult for U.S. law enforcement to reach. As a result, many of these actors are not brought to justice. 

A minority of these incidents occur from within the country and in those cases the ability of law enforcement, the FBI in particular, in bringing judgments against those folks is actually pretty good. There was a Texas school district a couple of years ago that was scammed out of several million dollars by a sophisticated phishing attack. It turned out that it was carried out by an individual in Florida who was caught and prosecuted. That person bought Rolexes and sports cars with the money that he stole from that district. But I suspect he is sitting in a jail right now or certainly awaiting the sentencing for that crime.

What lessons does the Illuminate Education breach hold for school districts and education technology vendors?

The story is still being told here, but this is going to be a very cautionary tale both for school districts and for vendors. This is going to evolve depending on the outcome of the investigations in New York. The state of New York has a fairly strict student data privacy regulation and it appears that Illuminate Education was in violation of the rules despite assurances that they were in compliance. So the state of New York has an opportunity to set an example here. Many ed tech companies will be watching very closely. 

We’re watching very closely as well. What may happen to renewals from school districts that use products from Illuminate Education? How many customers might they lose? 

It would be wise for vendors and suppliers to understand that it is only a matter of time before new regulations require more cybersecurity protections on the data that they hold about school children and school employees. 

From a school district perspective, it just underscores the importance of due diligence when they are selecting vendors and the need to consider the security practices of their vendors. This is not a one-time evaluation. Threats and vulnerabilities evolve so we need a continuous evaluation process. 

What lessons does this hack hold for parents and students, and what should they do to protect their information online?  

It should highlight for parents and students that there are risks in sharing information with schools and their partners. That risk can be managed, but I think it is beholden on parents to ask good questions of their school district about their cybersecurity risk management practices. These don’t have to be very technical questions, but I do think they deserve assurances from the school board and the superintendent that this is an issue that they’re taking seriously and a school district should be able to explain the steps that they’re taking and how they are continuously managing these risks. 

If you’re worried about being a potential victim — and I think it is always worth worrying about being a potential victim — there’s a couple of steps that I would encourage both parents and students to take. I would advise parents to freeze their children’s credit record. This is available for free at all of the major credit reporting agencies and it will prohibit an online criminal from stealing the identity of their children and opening credit accounts in their names. 

I would also underscore that good password management practices are always useful. I’m talking about not reusing the same username and password that you use for your school accounts for any of your personal accounts. to the greatest extent possible, you want to separate your school life from your private life and the best way to do that is to use a password manager. There are many free password manager applications that are available as well as a number of good paid options.