The Adams-Friendship Area School District, located roughly half an hour south of Wisconsin Rapids, says it may have lost about $92,000 after its bank flagged an unusual third-party payment request that the district’s business manager ultimately processed. The district has contacted law enforcement, an attorney and its insurance provider, and placed the business manager on administrative leave while the investigation continues.
According to WPR, the district’s bank notified school officials of the unusual payment request from a third party, and the business manager processed it anyway. The money trouble was first noticed back in August, and on Oct. 16 the district placed the business manager on leave as it reviews its business operations. Superintendent Nicki Ells wrote that the step “is not a determination of wrongdoing,” but rather a way to allow the district room to investigate.
As WSAW reports, the district contacted law enforcement, legal counsel and its insurance provider after discovering the theft of about $92,000. The district says it is working with its insurer to try to recover the funds, and a claim is currently being processed. The investigations remain ongoing, and the district says it’s limited in what else it can share for now.
Part of a Statewide Pattern
The Adams-Friendship case is one of more than 40 cyberattacks hitting Wisconsin K-12 schools so far this year, per the state Department of Public Instruction, which has warned districts to prepare for such incidents. Nationally, the U.S. Department of Education says school districts experience an average of five cyber incidents per week. A cybersecurity report the department compiled last year, drawing on data from 5,000 K-12 institutions over 18 months, identified more than 9,300 confirmed cyber incidents, with 82 percent of schools reporting impacts from cyber threats.
That report found ransomware, data breaches, malicious software and phishing attacks among the most common threats facing schools. Ransomware attackers held school software hostage during exam periods in some cases, while phishing attackers tricked school staff into revealing their credentials, according to the report.
Dorothea Salo, a professor with the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, said scammers often send hundreds of messages to organizations hoping someone takes the bait. Hospitals, libraries and other public institutions are increasingly targeted, Salo said, in part because they’re considered soft targets that often lack substantial cybersecurity staff. She added that artificial intelligence has made scams more common and harder to detect, and that for fake-invoice schemes like the one Adams-Friendship appears to have encountered, good accounting controls are the answer.
Other Districts Have Faced Similar Losses
Wisconsin DPI has reported a 200 percent increase in cybersecurity incident reports and requests for assistance from schools and districts, according to Government Technology. Phishing and ransomware top the list of concerns, alongside fraud, cyberbullying, harassment and insider attacks, and the agency is seeking more than $6 million for cybersecurity initiatives in its 2027-29 biennial budget request.
The Southern Door County School District faced a similar ordeal when it lost nearly $68,000 to a phishing email scam in fall 2025, according to a report from madison.com. That district ultimately recovered the money and made changes to its financial and cybersecurity practices afterward. Ransomware has caused even more disruptive outcomes elsewhere: a March 2026 attack took Alamo Heights Independent School District in Texas offline for five days and led to more than 26,600 residents being notified of a data breach, while a May ransomware incident forced Delano Public Schools in Minnesota to cancel classes for a day amid a $1.2 million ransom demand, per Government Technology’s coverage of national ransomware trends.
Nationally, the trend lines are mixed. Comparitech recorded 34 ransomware attacks against U.S. educational institutions in the first half of 2026, a 44 percent decline from the 61 it tracked in the last six months of 2025, with the U.S. accounting for a third of the 104 education-sector attacks recorded worldwide in that span.
What Happens Next
Ells told WPR in an email that the investigation is ongoing and the district will share more details in the future, though she said she could not comment on how the financial loss may affect district operations. For now, the business manager remains on leave while the district, its insurer and law enforcement work through what happened to the missing $92,000.
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