Student info breach raises father’s concerns about privacy, safety

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This article was published 24/03/2025 (222 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Winnipeg parent fears his daughter’s school is putting students at risk after she was mistakenly sent home with other kids’ personal information twice in three months.

Jason Keenan’s daughter, a sixth-grade student at Sister MacNamara School, went home with medical forms her teacher had given her to fill out to get an eye exam. Keenan was shocked to find his daughter had been given a form filled out by another student, including the student’s health card number, the parents’ insurance information, emergency contacts and other personal, identifying information.

Concerned, he informed the Winnipeg School Division of the error. On Tuesday, his daughter got home with her report card, and it was folded up with another student’s report card attached to it, again with personal information included.

“Accidents happen, I understand that,” he told the Free Press.

“But then to have it happen a second time within months and they’re coming to the same parent… you’ve got hundreds of kids in that school, how much other information have you sent out to other parents?”

Winnipeg School Division superintendent Matt Henderson said he had connected with Keenan and the school about the mistake and determined it was not a widespread issue.

“This is a unique, yet unfortunate, error,” he said in an email. “We addressed it with the school and it will not happen again.”

Keenan noted that even one mistake could be disastrous — he has a no-contact order with the mother of his children — and said if she got his home address or other personal information because a form was handed to the wrong student, it could be dangerous.

Between cyberattacks that have targeted schools across the province in recent months and human error, he said he doesn’t feel safe trusting his information with the school.

“The computer systems are being hacked, we’ve seen it in the news in the past and I’ve got this school just handing it out for free.”

This week, several school divisions said they planned to invest in cybersecurity measures in their 2025-2026 budgets after a string of data breaches, including an attack on Pembina Trails School Division in December so severe it temporarily shut down some of its systems and led to internal files being leaked on the dark web.

While schools may be focused on cybersecurity now, there should be consistent training and reminders to educators and other staff to ensure small human errors don’t create big problems, said Hernan Popper of Popp3r Cybersecurity Consulting Inc.

“”It’s human error, but it’s not so much on the on the employee, but on the company, or the school, or the school division, because they should be the ones who should be training their staff, and who should be actually making sure that there’s a process in place,” he said.

It’s not just schools; privacy leaks, be they through hacks or mistakes, are happening everywhere, and everyone has a personal responsibility to be vigilant, he said.

“My way of seeing this is, everyone should have the assumption that their information has already been leaked, and they should act accordingly,” he said.

“If you have this mindset, that your information is out there, then you are much more cautious in any kind of situation or event.”

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca

Malak Abas
Reporter

Malak Abas is a city reporter at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg’s North End, she led the campus paper at the University of Manitoba before joining the Free Press in 2020. Read more about Malak.

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