GBN Student Expelled Over Grade Hacking Sues

NORTHBROOK, IL — A Glenbrook North High School sophomore has filed a lawsuit against the school district, seeking to stop his expulsion for participating in a hack of the school’s grading system.

The 15-year-old Northbrook boy, M.G., identified only by his initials in the lawsuit, was expelled from GBN last month after administrators discovered three students had obtained login credentials from teachers, according to the school hearing officer’s report of the incident.

According to the report, the school first learned of the security breach when a student came into the dean’s office and explained that she had been sent a Snapchat image of her math grades from one of the students — although not the one who has filed suit.

A school investigation determined that a student had created a counterfeit login page masquerading as part of the Power School online grading system. Fooled by the fake login page and a new email account, “security.powerteacher@yandex.com”, some teachers were “phished” out of their passwords and some grades were changed.

(Sign up to get Patch real-time email alerts for the latest news for Northbrook— or another community in the area.)

The lawsuit, filed May 3, claims that M.G. was the least involved of the three students who participated in the scheme. While admitting to emailing a link to the fraudulent page to two teachers — as well as attempting to use the login information of another teacher provided to him by another student — M.G. and his lawyers argue that expulsion is too strong of a punishment.

At the school’s disciplinary hearing, M.G. said he only entered the teachers logins “to prove [the other student] wrong,” and that “he included the link to the fake site at [the other student’s] insistence," according to the hearing officer's report.

His lawsuit asked the court to reverse the school’s decision by finding that the decision to expel him was “arbitrary, unreasonable, capricious, or oppressive.” It argued that the district did not fully consider other forms of punishment before expelling the student as is required by state law and interpretations of past decisions. The law firm representing the student declined to add further comment beyond the text of the suit.

The school argued that the hacking incident caused a significant disruption to the school, with four staffers spending about 50 to 60 hours each working to fix the system and verify which information had been compromised, the report said.

According to a school spokesperson, the Power School system was first adopted by the district in 2013 at an annual cost of between $50,000 and $75,000.

In the past 10 years, three GBS students have been expelled, only one of whom was kicked out during the 2016-2017 school year, the spokesperson said.

Cook County Circuit Court Judge Thomas R. Allen has blocked the school from enforcing his expulsion until the case is resolved by granting a preliminary injunction to M.G. in the case.

The next hearing has been scheduled for August 7, according to court records.

Photo: Glenbrook North High School | Patch File