Pinal County school employees still trying to get paid after ransomware attack

The Pinal County Schools ransomware attacks have taken a new turn. Printer issues are now the reason for some employees not receiving their paychecks on Friday.

ABC15 received the following statement Friday from Pinal County School Superintendent.

“On Sunday, Pinal County School Office Data Processing Service Consortium became the victim of ransomware.

Pinal County Superintendent’s Office has been working round the clock since then to restore access for schools districts. Unfortunately, school districts who had not processed their payroll prior to the last weekend’s attacks have been affected. 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. The school districts will inform their employees when the checks are ready for pickup. The School Superintendent’s Office understands how difficult this will be for employees in our school districts and apologizes sincerely for the inconvenience this unfortunate situation has caused. The Office works with Homeland Security and FBI to fully investigate the incident and implement additional safeguards. This isolated system does not connect to the Pinal County Government IT Network. Therefore, no other Pinal County IT systems were affected.”

The process would be slowed down and the checks delayed. 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. Checks were delayed by printer issues, and the employees wouldn’t be receiving their checks until Friday. Thankfully, the majority of employees are handling it well. 

“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 “

Although it was delayed, checks were still able to be sent out by the Maricopa Unified High School District and Casa Grande Union 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 the county would work around-the-clock to ensure that checks were sent to every district who could have been impacted.