2022 THE Journal IT Leadership Summit

The last couple years have caused a shift in priorities for IT organizations in K–12. Data security, student data privacy, and equity gaps have all come to the forefront as major issues impacting schools across the country. The drastic increase in the cost of living that we’re seeing now is not likely to help the situation but only to compound the problems of crime and inequity. For the 2022 IT Leadership Summit, we spotlight strategies that IT leaders can use to help deliver technology-driven solutions to the education communities they serve.

Special guest Rod Russeau is somewhat of an expert in the changing data privacy regulatory environment: His state and a handful of others have new laws requiring district IT leaders to significantly step up oversight of student data protections, by district systems and by ed tech providers. With concerns about student data privacy being discussed in legislatures across the nation and at the federal level, could the new role of “student data privacy policing” now assigned to K-12 IT leadership in a handful of states be a harbinger of what’s to come nationally? What should IT leaders be mindful of now, and what should they be prepared for in the near future as policymakers consider more regulations to protect student data privacy?

Presenter: Rod Russeau, CETL, CISM, CISSP, CDPSE, Director of Technology & Information Services, Community District 99, Illinois, and Chairperson of the CoSN Cybersecurity Initiative.

The MS-ISAC serves as the focal point for cyber threat prevention, protection, response, and recovery for the nation’s state, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT) governments, including K–12 schools. This session leverages the MS-ISAC’s unique data set of threats observed against and reported by K-12 entities to distill the most common attack types, malware, and threat actor TTPs used against the sector. Randy Rose, Senior Director of Cyber Threat Intelligence, will discuss this data, compared against what is observed in other sectors, and give real-world, practical, and affordable recommendations on how to mitigate these threats at all stages.

Presenter: Randy Rose, GREM, GCTI, CISSP, is Senior Director of Operations & Intelligence, Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC), Center for Internet Security.

Technology leaders in school districts have a crucial role to play in being a force for change and disrupting inequity in K–12 education. In this presentation, Director of Technology Nick Williams shows how technology departments can use the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to design learning environments in which every student can thrive.

Presenter: Nick Williams, CETL,MS, is a Director of Technology at Bartholomew Consolidated School Corporation in Columbus, Indiana.