From Monday through Friday last week, students at Gretna High School (GHS) and at Gretna East went through changes to the passwords of their computers, their emails and their Classlink. Many students resisted the changes, and there was some grumbling. Michelle Evans, GHS’s one-to-one technology coordinator, led the effort to change the student passwords at GHS. She said the new passwords should be effective in protecting students’ data.
The changes were necessary because of several incidents involving hacked and compromised accounts, Evan said.
“We’ve had a lot of security issues with Google lately with our accounts, even a lot of teacher accounts being compromised. You guys probably didn’t realize it, but teachers and staff went through a password change in the fall, so they had to go through that, too,” Evans said. “They’re actually using fourteen-character passwords, so a little bit more complex than what students have.”
While changing their passwords, students were handed small papers that displayed the new passwords. Students followed several steps to make the password changes.
“There’s a risk (of a data leak) at any time, period,” Evans said. “There’s definitely a bigger risk when you pick your own password, though, because most students typically pick something easy; something that’s not difficult enough. With these new passwords, we took a lot of care to make sure that, even if a student leaves a room with their password card, no one who might see it can really tell who it belongs to or anything like that. We actually have had students come in who liked their school password and used it on all of their accounts, even personal ones, so when their password was hacked, all of their accounts were compromised.”
Since GHS has had password changes, middle and elementary schoolers who used the same format in the past for their passwords also have to go through changes.
“[Middle Schoolers] are doing it [this] week, so they will already have more difficult passwords set for them coming in and, yes, they’re with us longer. So there is a chance that a password could be compromised, but there is a procedure for us to get a new random password for them so we may have to utilize that process for those students, but hopefully not,” Evans said, “If they take care and keep it private, they probably won’t have any issues.”
Many people at GHS expected the password changes to have more issues than they did since the talk about them and troubleshooting has already died down since last week. Among these concerned parties was the school’s principal, Todd Mueller.
“I definitely am pleased with how well it went,” Mueller said. “I mean, when we did it with the teachers, it was like a test, and that went well. Still, I have to give a lot of credit to the tech department for making it run as smoothly as they did, with very few problems.”
All of the problems the staff has seen so far are student errors rather than errors with the system.
“They’ll have people come in that can’t get it to work, and it turns out they entered it wrong, or they entered their email wrong, or something like that,” Mueller said. “We really haven’t seen any actual problems with the tech.”
