UPDATE: South Callaway school officials announced this afternoon that public off-campus access to PowerSchool has been restored.
Original article:
MOKANE, Mo. - The online information portal for South Callaway R-2 students and parents has been temporarily shut down after a vulnerability in the system was discovered.
"PowerSchool," a leading service that provides online school information portals, was working to patch and secure the system, South Callaway said on its website.
Pearson School Systems, which operates PowerSchool, did not immediately return a phone call or email about the problems.
A notice on the district's website said the district has disabled public off-campus access to the service, which provides up-to-date school information. It's not known what personal information the site maintains.
The site will be back up when South Callaway can confirm with Pearson that data on the site is secure and the vulnerability has been patched.
"We have shut down anything where an outside source is able to come into our servers," said South Callaway Superintendent Kevin Hillman. "Our IT department is in contact with our vendor, and when they give us the all clear that there is no danger to the security of our information, we will bring it back up. We have not had any problems, this is purely a precautionary measure for the security of our students and their families. We don't anticipate any problems, but we decided to do this to be fair and safe for our students."
Some other area school districts use the PowerSchool system, but it's unclear whether it has affected them.
Blair Oaks R-2 School District said that it has not been notified by Pearson of any problems to its system.
The Fulton Sun contributed to this story.