There's a new twist in the Pinal County Schools' ransomware attack with printer issues now to blame for holding up paychecks for some school employees Friday.
ABC15 received this statement from Pinal County Schools Superintendent Friday afternoon:
"On Sunday, the Pinal County School Office Data Processing Service Consortium was the victim of a ransomware attack.
Since then, Pinal County School Superintendent's Office staff have been working around the clock to restore access for school districts. Unfortunately, payroll processing has been impacted for school districts that had not processed payroll prior to last weekend's attack. To ensure employees are paid as promptly as possible, the School Superintendent's Office is today printing checks for the 4514 impacted staff who work in the following school districts: Apache Junction, Casa Grande High School, Combs, Coolidge, Florence, Maricopa, Mary C. O'Brien, Oracle, Picacho, Sacaton, Santa Cruz, Stanfield, Superior, and Toltec. Employees of these school districts should await instruction from their school district on when checks are available for collection. The School Superintendent's Office recognizes the difficulty this will cause employees of our school districts, and wholeheartedly apologizes for the inconvenience resulting from this unfortunate situation. The Office is working with the authorities, including Homeland Security and the FBI, to investigate this incident thoroughly and ensure that additional safeguards are put in place. This isolated system is not connected to the Pinal County Government IT Network, and so no other Pinal County systems have been impacted."
But soon, printing issues would slow down the process and delay the checks. The Florence Unified School District thought they’d have checks ready by 2 p.m. Friday, but when employees showed up, they were met with bad news. The printer issues had delayed checks getting out and employees would not be able to receive their checks on Friday. Thankfully, most employees are taking it in stride.
"They’ve been pretty supportive and understanding," said Toby Haugen, FUSD's director of human resources. "They’re frustrated, we’re frustrated we all want to get paid and go about our lives and pay rent and buy groceries, it's nerve-wracking and frustrating “
It was delayed, but checks were able to get out in the Maricopa Unified School District and Casa Grande Union High School District.
"We felt completely helpless," said Maricopa Unified Superintendent Tracey Lopeman."Rent and mortgages are due childcare payments, everything is due at the first of the month, plus we’re in the middle of our two-week fall break."
Pinal County's Superintendent told ABC15 they would be working around the clock to make sure checks got out to every district that may have been impacted.
