May 2008 — News
Print this article | Email this articleClick here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal
Osage County: Security in a Small School District
The Osage County R-II School District in Osage County, Missouri, is tiny--600 to 650 students, according to Richard Becker, technology coordinator. Yet it faces the same computer security challenges of larger districts with far fewer resources--a scarcity of resources that includes staffing. Becker himself makes up half of the entire technical team. The district is located in Linn, a rural town of about 1,400 people, many of whom commute the 20-plus miles to the Missouri capital, Jefferson City.
How does a small district stay on top of security matters? The solution consists of one part technology--albeit mostly legacy--one part elbow grease, and one part a "secret weapon" resource provided by the state.
The Current Infrastructure
Osage County R-II consists of two campuses a few miles apart, one with the elementary school and administration offices and the other with the junior and senior high buildings. Recently, it went live with a 1 gigabit fiber optic intercampus network connection to replace the 11 megabit wireless solution. And soon, work will be completed on a fiber optic Ethernet connection delivering Internet access for the district at 5 megabits to replace the existing T1 circuit delivering 1.5 megabits.
Also, in the last 18 months, Becker and technologist Eric Morfeld have upgraded from the Novell NetWare version 4.11 network operating system to Windows Server 2003 and Active Directory. Last year, the district had a "hodge-podge" of old machines including Windows 95 and 98 workstations, Becker sayd. By the end of this school year remaining Windows 2000 machines will be replaced by computers running Windows XP and a newer version of Microsoft Office. The network has about 350 workstations.
Becker, who has been in the job for four years, said the district, which was coming out of several financially stressed fiscal cycles, had no technology budget when he arrived. Money was spent purely to keep systems running. Yet recently voters approved a bond measure that made about $200,000 available for technology improvements. The lion's share of that--$124,000 to $140,000--was dedicated to the installation of interactive whiteboards. But that left sufficient funds to make other upgrades possible as well.
Security Concerns
Becker said he realizes his district isn't cutting edge. Video surveillance currently consists of eight cameras that feed into a VCR system at the high school. Every three days the principal swaps out the tape. The maintenance folks have installed interior doors at the main entrance of the elementary school that are locked from the outside and require office personnel to grant access to the building. Fences and locked gates were constructed around the elementary that require a keycode to gain entrance.
But beyond that, Becker takes the layered approach to security because, he said, "like anybody, we have to deal with external threats." He pointed out, "It doesn't matter where you're located. It's not a big city thing. If you have a broadband connection to your network system and surplus storage capacity, that's attractive to hackers, virus/malware distributors, illegal file sharers, and e-mail spammers."
