OBSERVER Photo by J.M. Lesinski The Fredonia Central School district Board of Education gathers for their last meeting before school starts.

A recent acceptance into a regional initiative from Harvard University and a data breach involving school software were the topics of discussion from Director of Instruction Joseph Reyda at the latest meeting of the Fredonia Central School district board of education.

“I would like to announce that the Fredonia School district has been accepted into the National Center for Rural Education Research Network, which is an initiative of the Center of Education Policy Research,” Reyda began in his comments. “We are one of 50 rural schools from Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York to be selected to do this five-year study.”

The initiative looks to research a number of college-related inquiries around the district, as well as other areas for study. “We are going to be looking at addressing chronic absenteeism, college readiness and college enrollment,” Reyda noted. “We are at the very beginning of this process. We look forward to working with them on it.”

Reyda also noted several other school districts in the area involved in the initiative. “The other local school districts that have been accepted are Gowanda, Randolph and Sherman.”

On the flip-side of the good news, Reyda then informed the board of a data breach that may’ve affected the elementary school. “We were notified over the summer that aimswebPlus, it’s an online program we use for our children in ELA and math,” Reyda commented. “We’ve used it for the past 13-15 years in our elementary school.”

Reyda then gave the exact date of the breach and noted the school may not be in any immediately compromised position. “In November of 2018 there was a data breach,” he stated. “Now, we stopped using aimswebPlus at the end of 2018, we weren’t even actively using it when the breach occurred, but yet we cannot guarantee that the data that was in there from our students, which consisted of a student name and grade level, was not compromised.”

Closing out his comments, Reyda noted that a newsletter update would be circulated throughout the district to further address the issue. “We felt that in the best interest of being really transparent to our residents, we created a letter explaining the situation, and that’s going to be going out probably next week,” he said. “We just wanted to make (them) aware that there was a data breach and that some of our student data could have been leaked.”