101 duplicate report cards sent to wrong Dist. 203 families

A glitch in new Naperville Unit District 203 software is being blamed for a potentially embarrassing situation that occurred with high school report cards.

The glitch resulted in a second copy of 101 report cards being sent to the students’ emergency contacts along with their parents.

Roger Brunelle, the district’s chief information officer, said programmers spent two days searching for the error before they found what caused the duplicate report cards to be sent.

“If a student’s designated emergency contact is also a district parent who has a student attending the same high school as the student, that triggered a duplicate report card to be mailed to the emergency contact in addition to the one sent to the student’s home,” Brunelle said Wednesday. “The duplicate report card would have been addressed ‘To the parents of,’ so we’re hoping the emergency contact recognized the name on the card and realized the mistake.”

The district is asking that any report cards received in error be returned to the high school.

Brunelle said the technical error has been corrected by the vendor who created the program that generates and sets up the mailing of report cards for the district.

“It was a vendor’s mistake, but the district takes full responsibility and we apologize for any confusion or alarm this may have caused,” he said. “We take any situation involving the identification and private information of any of our students very carefully. We are comforted slightly, however, that this affected less than 1 percent of our families and the information was only sent to an emergency contact who presumably has the best interest of the student at heart.”

Brunelle said the glitch also caused several junior high students’ report cards to be duplicated. But those report cards are handed out to students, rather than being mailed, and any duplicate copies were given to the appropriate students.