Schools

State to Investigate Unauthorized Release of Assessments

Montclair School Board may suspend its own investigation.

The New Jersey Department of Education informed the Montclair Board of Education Tuesday that it plans to investigate how student assessments wound up on a public website, the district announced in a release.

The Office of Fiscal Accountability and Compliance (OFAC) will conduct the investigation into the unauthorized release of 14 assessments, which ended up on a public website for a brief period in late October just days before they were to be administered to students. 

The Montclair BOE's own investigation, which has met with numerous roadblocks, may be suspended as a result of OFAC stepping in.

The school board said it intends to support OFAC’s efforts and will schedule a meeting of the board "as soon as practical" to discuss discontinuing its own investigation. 

“I’m confident that OFAC’s investigation will enable the Board and the Montclair community to obtain a detailed understanding of the events leading to the unauthorized release of our assessments," Montclair BOE President Robin Kulwin said. "More importantly, OFAC’s involvement will enable the Board to shift its focus back to its primary mission of governing the public schools.”

The news from the state comes the same week an internal township memo came to light which claims there is no evidence of hacking or security breaches on the web servers the board shares with the municipal government.

The memo, dated Dec. 29, said the tests were saved with permissions which would allow anyone to access them from the Internet. 

The investigation into the possible security breach has resulted in more controversy than the actual compromising of the tests. The assessments designed to align with new Common Core State Standards were created by groups of teachers during the summer of 2013 at a cost of nearly a half-million dollars.

The ACLU-NJ successfully blocked an effort by the board's attorney to obtain the name and contact information of an anonymous blogger who the board said could potentially know something about how the tests wound up on the site Gobookee.org

Montclair School Board Vice President Shelly Lombard said at the time, “It’s our responsibility to investigate this because this is a theft — just as if somebody broke into our schools and stole hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of computer equipment.”

The investigation hit another dead-end in December when the township council voted to deny the school board access to the servers shared by the two entities.




Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here