By Stephanie Mariel Petrellese

The Garden City School District is assuring residents via their Web site that they were not involved in any way with a recent security breach involving an outside computer consulting company.

The district posted the following message on their home page: "It has come to our attention that e-mail addresses of some Garden City parents were posted on a web site. This information did not come from Garden City Public Schools or a contractor affiliated with the school district. The security of our data base has not been compromised. Any information found on the web did not use the school district data base as the source of information. If you have concerns about the posting, please ask your e-mail service to help you determine its source."

More than 30 parents in the Garden City School District had been notified by another parent via e-mail that their names and e-mail addresses were available on a Web site owned by professional consulting firm Computer Business Solutions. The e-mail mistakenly said that this was a vendor hired by the district.

When the Computer Business Solutions owner learned of the problem, he sent all of the parents involved an e-mail explaining what happened. The file that contained their e-mail address was an old Garden City Centennial Soccer Club e-mail list.

He said the addresses and names were not posted on his Web site: "Google's search engine spiders may have found it while traversing the web. In layman's terms, to make their searches faster, these search engines such as Google.com will scan all files found on every server to find keywords that will make their searches more efficient."

He said the file has since been removed and security has been tightened. "We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you and it will not happen again."