Rochester Public Schools cancels MCA testing in wake of April 6 cyber attack

Apr. 24—ROCHESTER — Rochester Public Schools has canceled MCA testing for the year due to its process of dealing with the

cyber attack that began April 6.

Known as the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments, the test gauges students in reading, science and math "to meet federal and state legislative requirements," according to the Minnesota Department of Education.

"We reached the conclusion that we are not able to implement the state assessments very reluctantly," RPS Superintendent Kent Pekel said in a statement. "We take those tests seriously as a measure of the performance of our system, and a tool for meeting the educational needs of our students. We look forward to resuming administration of the MCA tests in future years after we have resolved the cyber security incident we are working through this spring."

A statement from the district said there are multiple challenges to hosting the MCAs while also recovering from the cyber threat. Among them is the fact that the district is in the process of resetting passwords on thousands of student devices. The devices also need to have testing software in order to host the MCAs.

Some of the tests also require students to stream video, which RPS described as a "high bandwidth activity at a time that our wireless internet services are running at reduced capacity."

Pivoting to traditional paper tests isn't possible either, RPS said, since the the Department of Education isn't able "to make available the volume of paper tests required."

"We are working with MDE to understand what this will mean for students," the district said in its statement, "and will share an update with families as soon as it is available."

On Friday, April 21,

the district said that student data hadn't been accessed during the cyber attack. It also said it did not appear that the employee data accessed had been used for fraud or identity theft.