Social Security Numbers No Longer Required for Student Enrollment

WKMS | By Todd Hatton

Published August 9, 2012 at 9:35 AM CDT

The Montgomery County, Tennessee school system is no longer requesting student Social Security numbers. The shift comes months after hackers exposed the personal data of about 4300 current and former students along with the private information of about 4900 current and former employees. In many of those cases, the data included social security numbers. School system spokeswoman Elise Shelton says the school system will generate its own identification numbers for students, using the same system as Clarksville-Montgomery County schools. Shelton says the school system began notifying affected individuals last week by email and has set up a call center to handle questions. A criminal investigation into the security breach is ongoing.

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Todd Hatton

Todd Hatton hails from Paducah, Kentucky, where he got into radio under the auspices of the late, great John Stewart of WKYX while a student at Paducah Community College. He also worked at WKMS in the reel-to-reel tape days of the early 1990s before running off first to San Francisco, then Orlando in search of something to do when he grew up. He received his MFA in Creative Writing at Murray State University. He vigorously resists adulthood and watches his wife, Angela Hatton, save the world one plastic bottle at a time.

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