Thousands of Illinois teachers were incorrectly told Monday that they were being audited.

The Illinois State Board of Education tracks teachers’ professional development to ensure they complete 120 hours of continuing education credits every five years.

Although the audit notice left teachers scrambling to assemble their documentation, the agency said on social media that the email was sent in error for a large portion of those educators.

“ISBE recently discovered that an audit notice was mistakenly emailed to all educators who renewed their licenses in 2025,” the agency said in the social media post, adding that if a teacher received the notice in error, no action is required on their part and the correct group would receive their official audit notices soon.

ISBE Press Secretary Lindsay Record said in an email that about 23,000 teachers received the email.

The audit notice was sent to each teacher’s primary and secondary emails on Monday, according to the ISBE website. For those required to submit, the documentation must be uploaded by Feb. 15.

“As soon as the issue was identified, ISBE alerted education leaders while corrective steps were taken,” said Record, who added that correction emails were sent on Monday and Tuesday to school administrators and to two groups of educators: Those who were legitimately selected for audit and those who received the message in error.

Correction emails have been sent to all affected educators.

According to the Illinois school report card, Illinois has about 140,000 teachers who must renew their licenses every five years. Of those, only a small percentage are audited to ensure the documentation is correct.

Oswego’s Traughber Junior High School Band Director Rachel Maxwell said that her understanding of reality is that only about 300 teachers are audited each year. Even before the agency announced its mistake, she said she figured it out when a number of coworkers said they received the same email.

“It was the world’s worst ‘Reply All’” email mistake, Maxwell said.

Throughout the day, more and more people commented on her social media post, saying they spent at least a few hours assembling five or six years of documentation.

“We all felt like we hit the lottery of doom,” Maxwell said.

None of the teachers she talked to had a problem with providing the information, she said, but they were confused as to what could have triggered the audit.

Much professional development in her district is done in-house. Teachers are warned to submit only the professional development documentation they need to the state’s tracking database.

“If you put in everything, it will flag you,” much like an IRS audit, Maxwell said.

Comments on the ISBE’s Facebook post included many upset that the error was posted on social media instead of a new email going out to let them know some were in error.

“Those of us who spent hours working on this today should get [professional development] hours for the next cycle,” one teacher posted.

Others asked for apologies in writing rather than via social media because they needed to collect information that could be several years old.

In her email, Record said ISBE apologizes for the confusion caused by this error and asked those with questions to email renewal@isbe.net.