Private special needs student records sent home with wrong children in Mississauga

A Mississauga parent is raising the alarm after she received the wrong school records for special needs students.

Margaret Hodgson, who has three children enrolled at Riverside Public School, told INsauga.com that she has received private documents for three different students who weren’t her children.

The records contain private information such as home addresses, medical diagnoses and therapies that were prescribed or received at school, assessments from professionals at the school and suspensions.

Hodgson said the first time she received the wrong student record was in 2019. At that time another student’s child occupational report was filed inside her child’s records, she said.

The report contained private information about a student with cerebral palsy, she said. She immediately notified the school and returned the document.

She was told the issue was going through the privacy department so they could figure out how it happened and then retrain all of the staff on proper procedures.

“I trusted that they were doing their due diligence and making sure that it didn’t happen again,” Hodgson said.

But fast-forward to 2024 and it happened again, she said.

This time one of her children brought documents home with them at the end of the school year in June but she didn’t find them until she was searching through a pile of papers in September.

She found Identification Placement and Review Committee documents for two different students. The documents outline what kind of special education students are going to receive and in what type of classroom.

A Peel District School Board spokesperson confirmed the wrong documents were sent to a parent.

“On Monday September 16, 2024, Peel District School Board’s Privacy and Information Officer received notification that a parent of a child at Riverside Public School inadvertently received information from the school not intended for that child,” a statement from the board reads. “Our Privacy and Information Officer immediately reported the breach to the Information Privacy Commissioner of Ontario.”

“Peel District School Board has a Privacy Breach Procedure and a Privacy Breach Protocol, and the school board followed steps in the protocol. Our Privacy and Information Officer will work with the Information Privacy Commissioner of Ontario when they conduct their investigation, and we will incorporate any recommendations they make.”

Hodgson said these documents identified the students, their addresses, the type of special needs they have and they also outlined specialized programs for the students for the 2024/5 school year. There were important consent forms for the parents to allow ongoing consultations with teachers or professionals who would be involved with the students.

“The front of the envelope even says, ‘urgent,'” Hodgson said. “So I’m not even sure if the parents ever got this, I notified the school immediately.”

Hodgson said the school asked her to send the documents back to the school with her children.

“I should trust my 12-year-old to take personal documents of somebody else to the school? That’s a privacy concern all of its own,” she said.

She refused and filed a complaint with the privacy commissioner.

“Because if it happened five years ago and it’s continuing to happen, then it means that policies are not being followed and are not being safeguarded,” she said.