‘Cyber incident’ leaves 2024 Richland grads without transcripts weeks before college

Class of 2024 graduates from Richland ’s high schools will have to wait longer to get their hands on an official high school transcript.

Superintendent Shelley Redinger wrote in an email to families last week that the district hopes to have transcripts completed and sent out by the end of the month to colleges and to families requesting them.

Until then, Richland High School and Hanford High School will send letters colleges and universities to explain the situation.

The platform the school district uses to enter grades and print transcripts, PowerSchool, has been offline since June 11.

That’s when staff initiated a widespread phone and internet outage, taking systems offline after staff discovered “unauthorized access” to some of its computer systems.

A third-party forensics investigation recently concluded and found no sensitive student or staff data had been leaked in the breach .

“I want to thank you for your patience and understanding as we continue to navigate the cyber incident that occurred before school was dismissed for the summer,” Redinger wrote.

“We know this has caused frustration for our students and families while waiting for final report cards and transcripts. Our top priority is restoring our networks and getting transcripts to colleges and other higher education institutions for our graduated seniors.”

Parents of middle school and high school students can see their final grades through the Canvas portal. Elementary grades were complete before June 12, the final day of the school year.

“While the timing of this incident is unfortunate, we are grateful that our data is safe. We ask for your continued patience as we work to securely restore our systems,” Redinger wrote.

The outage is expected to stretch well into the summer as the district slowly brings its systems back online.

The district has not given a timeline on when specific services and systems will be functioning again, nor have officials said why it’s taking weeks to fix.

Records requests, applications and other submissions will be processed after the district’s systems are fully restored, say officials.

New students can enroll online, but the enrollment process won’t be complete until the systems are back online.