The South Okanagan and Similkameen School District #53 was not impacted by a recent cybersecurity breach that hit other Canadian districts. 

A third party-application that stores school-based staff and student information was breached between Dec. 22 and 28, and on Jan. 8 informed districts across North America of the potential privacy risk. 

The PowerSchool IT program was breached between Dec. 22 and 28, and districts in Ontario, Alberta and Newfoundland and Labrador were impacted. 

Marcus Toneatto, superintendent for SD53, confirmed via email that no local school was impacted. 

"We do utilize PowerSchool, but our district does not utilize the product in question, and it was confirmed that information related to other PowerSchool products was not affected, so we were not impacted as a result of this incident," said Toneatto. "No student or staff information from the Okanagan Similkameen school district has been compromised."

PowerSchool, a U.S.-based provider of cloud software, said in a statement it has taken "all appropriate steps" to prevent further unauthorized access or misuse of the affected data.

It also said that the incident is "contained" and that it does not anticipate the data being shared or made public. 

With files from the Canadian Press