Union County students get lucky: Report cards delayed

Any of Union County’s 42,000 public school students who were worried about getting a bad report card next week can wipe those sweaty brows for the time being.

Due to an Internet “attack” earlier this month on the state program that processes report cards, Union County district officials decided it was best to delay issuing cards on Oct. 21 as scheduled.

Union is one of about 20 school systems in the state impacted by problems with the PowerSchool Group program, an online system used to produce report cards, officials said. The system was back up and running Friday, but Union officials were still unsure when report cards can be issued. At issue, officials said, is the accuracy of the cards.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools are apparently not impacted by the problem, so cards will go out as expected the first week of November.

In an email to Union County school officials, North Carolina Public Schools officials said the PowerSchool Group began experiencing an unprecedented “attack” on Oct. 8. The attack was an attempt to make the online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources, said the email.

There have been subsequent threats in the days since, officials added.

“The scope of the attack was massive, and tens of thousands separate devices spread across the Internet were generating 800 million connections per second, which caused a flood of excessive network traffic,” the email said.

Union County officials noted Friday that when the PowerSchool system is running properly, parents can log in and get their child’s grades without ever having to wait for a report card.

This story was originally published October 16, 2015 at 3:13 PM with the headline "Union County students get lucky: Report cards delayed."