Password Protecting Student Reports

In our ever increasing efforts to protect student confidentiality and personal information, we password protect student report cards and test results when emailing them to parents. This helps protect the information in the unlikely event that an email gets sent to the incorrect address.

To do this, we generate the reports from PowerSchool or Google Docs, typically in a Firstname Lastname grade # Progress Report.pdf format. These are put into a folder (in this case, the folder is ES_T3_PDFs) there is also a filedata.csv file that has each file’s password in the first column, the original filename in column 8, and the new filename in column 9.

The python script below then runs, opens each report, creates a new file object, password protects it, and writes it to a new folder (Secure_ES_T3_PDFs).

import PyPDF2
import csv
import sys
#Open csv with password,filename,newfilename
c = open('filedata.csv', 'r')
# Create a reader object to store the data in filedata.csv
reader = csv.reader(c, delimiter=',')
# Process each row of data
count = 0
for row in reader:
    # The password located in the first column
    password = str(row[0])
    # The current (original) filename in "firstname lastname grade # Progress Report - Student_Number" format
    currFileName = row[7]
    # New filename is the same as original but without the Student_Number 
    newFileName = row[8]
    # Skip the header row
    if (password != "Password"): # Skip the first row with "Password" in first column
        # print row # every 10th row - just to monitor progress
        if (count % 10 == 0):
            print(count)
        # Open non-encrypted file
        pdfFile = open("PasswordProtect/ES_T3_PDFs/"+currFileName, 'rb')
        #coverLetter = open("PasswordProtect/coverLetter.pdf", 'rb')
        # Create reader and writer objects
        pdfReader = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(pdfFile)
        #pdfReader02 = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(coverLetter)
        pdfWriter = PyPDF2.PdfFileWriter()
        # The next 2 lines put the welcome letter at the beginning of the new file
        #print("Inserting Cover Letter")
        #for pageNum in range(pdfReader02.numPages):
        #    pdfWriter.addPage(pdfReader02.getPage(pageNum))
        # Add all pages to writer for each page in input file, add it to the output file
        for pageNum in range(pdfReader.numPages):
            pdfWriter.addPage(pdfReader.getPage(pageNum))
        # Encrypt with password
        pdfWriter.encrypt(password)
        # Write it to an output file
        resultPdf = open("PasswordProtect/Secure_ES_T3_PDFs/"+newFileName, 'wb')
        pdfWriter.write(resultPdf)
        resultPdf.close()
    count += 1