After saying their goodbyes to U-High at the end of the year, certain members of the Class of 2023 received the high school transcripts of their peers due to an unintentional security leak.
The administration sent a message to the students who had received the transcripts asking them to delete the emails and attachments, and sent an apology letter to the families of the graduating class.
Sarah Arehart, Laboratory Schools registrar, said the incident was caused by human error, and she understands frustration regarding the incident.
“A transcript is a private document,” Ms. Arehart said. “It covers your academic journey, and sharing that information with anybody else, without permission, is always difficult. We take student privacy seriously when it comes to data management.”
Brian Hewlett, director of information and registrar services, said that months before the accident happened, staff in the registrar’s office were already exploring ways to improve the system.
Last school year, the staff discovered Parchment, a third-party platform for safe and secure documentation flow used by the University of Chicago. Parchment was not used during the incident, and the platform is still being arranged for use later this school year.
Ms. Arehart said she is hopeful that a system like Parchment will prevent a future similar error.
“I think the implementation of Parchment is evidence that we already had student privacy on our minds,” Ms. Arehart said. “It’s part of a larger shift that we are making in order to make sure that those digital records are all secure.”
TYT'23 • Sep 18, 2023 at 11:15 am
Sharing a bit of the student experience when this happened:
I was never sent the transcripts of my peers’, but a number of my friends were. They told me this happened before I heard anything from administration. If not for my friends, I would not have known my transcript was shared. Later that day, students who received their peers’ transcripts were asked to delete them (on the honor system), and the email was sent to students and families about six hours after the initial incident. At this point, I had already found out hours earlier.
I spent June 26 extremely uncomfortable about having my grades from the past four years circling around. I was terrified about being judged, shamed or looked down upon for my overall high school performance. I also felt incredibly violated by the school for being a victim of this. Further, I was concerned that some students might not know their transcript was shared during the six hour lag between the initial leak and admin email. I wasn’t even sure if an email from admin would come at all. Personally, it was (and still is) unsettling to know that my four years of hard work was widely shared among the Class of 2023, which is a FERPA violation, and the admin seemed to downplay the emotional effect.
Having graduated, my high school information doesn’t hold much weight currently, but I still feel uneasy every day when I think about this large violation of privacy.