Many homeschooling families in Fairfax County received an odd email on October 14 from Lightspeed Systems of Austin, Texas, that included what appeared to be a weekly report of each of their children’s online activities. Families quickly—and accurately—concluded that Fairfax County Public Schools was behind this.
Since Virginia law prohibits school divisions from releasing information that homeschooling families file as part of their routine compliance, this was very troubling. Lightspeed should never have had access to private homeschool information. Using this information to send a rather startling email to parents made it even more vexing.
Taking action
Both I and Patricia Behr with Home Educators Association of Virginia quickly worked to resolve this. On October 16, a school representative acknowledged that there was an error and said, “We are fixing this process with our technical teams to exclude your contact information from our system and remove you from the Lightspeed system so you are not contacted again.”
I replied and reminded the representative that so long as any private homeschool information remains under the control of Lightspeed, a bad actor could potentially hack into Lightspeed, obtain that private information, and use it for illegal purposes—with unpredictable consequences. I asked the school division to notify me when the task of removing all private homeschool information has been completed.
Positive resolution
A few hours later, the school representative told us that the tech team at Lightspeed has confirmed that all private homeschool information has been removed from their systems.
“We greatly appreciate the quick turnaround time in response to HSLDA and HEAV raising this issue to them. HSLDA places a high priority on resolving matters like this on behalf of our members, and we’re glad Fairfax and Lightspeed viewed it is as a priority situation also.
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