International Leadership of Texas (ILTexas) is a free K-12 charter school program serving over 23,000 children on 21 campuses. Students are taught English, Spanish and Mandarin as part of a demanding curriculum designed to foster future success. Of ILTexas’s 2022-23 student population, 71.8% were categorized as economically disadvantaged.

At Cannon School in Concord, North Carolina, esports has become a tool for raising spirits and building collaboration among its high school students. To encourage participation and better compete with other schools, the school increased its available bandwidth with the installation of Spectrum Enterprise fiber solutions.

The Schools of McKeel Academy consist of three institutions in Lakeland, Florida. These provide free education to children in grades pre-K through 12, employing a technology-focused curriculum. Established in 1998 as a high-performing charter school system, the schools have built a reputation for academic excellence.

K-12 leaders have an opportunity to leverage the edtech investments they made in the shift to remote and hybrid instruction and build on teachers’ new skills to lead digital transformation in their schools.

The long-tail impact of the Covid-19 pandemic continues in K-12 education, both providing rich lessons learned from the experience for both educators and parents and continuing to stimulate new energy around how to improve educational experiences for all students.

Heritage Academy, a private school serving grades pre-kindergarten through 12, found itself entering the 2022 holiday season with a sudden, major problem: its aging telephone system broke down.  Find out how they were able to upgrade campus-wide communications in just nine days.

Over the past 40 years Reverend Joseph E. Washington has provided healthcare for the underserved, promoted economic opportunity for women and minorities, and established a mentoring program for young adults. Now, at a time when most people would be eyeing retirement, Washington continues to advocate for justice and champion equality.

Historically, K–12 school systems have taken a “do-it-yourself” approach to deploying and managing their network infrastructure. This DIY model has served school systems well for many years. However, K–12 leaders are starting to rethink this method.

While zero trust can be challenging to implement, its potential for reducing risks and improving network security is significant. Here are four keys to success when moving ahead with a zero-trust approach.

Zero trust acknowledges there is no longer a traditional network perimeter to be defended because applications now exist in the cloud and users can log into the network from any location. Basically, the network edge extends to each user, and security is achieved by authenticating users’ identities. To secure the network edge under this new paradigm, school districts need better visibility and control of who’s using the network and what resources they have permission to access. Here’s what to look for in an authentication solution.

Implementing zero trust is a journey, but the journey isn’t necessarily linear.  “It involves moving from an old security architecture to a new one. That takes time and many steps,” says IT consultant Joel Snyder, owner and senior partner at Opus One. Explore this Zero Trust Maturity Model, created to help K-12 leaders decide how far (and at what pace) they’d like to travel on the journey toward zero trust.

As K-12 leaders look to shield their network from attacks, the nature of cybersecurity is changing. With more applications running in the cloud and users accessing resources from any location, school district networks can no longer be protected by establishing strong perimeter defenses. Instead, districts need modern defenses that extend the network edge to each user and application.

More than 2.6 million students across the United States were affected by ransomware attacks alone from 2018 to 2021, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports. Factoring in other kinds of incidents, the total number of students impacted by cybersecurity breaches during that time is even larger. In this guide  we explore CISA’s top recommendations to solve the cybersecurity challenge for schools and districts.

The mission at The Academy of Hope, a public charter school for kindergarten through eighth grade, is to maximize student potential by cultivating business acumen, sharpening critical thinking and improving communication skills. But outdated technology was standing in the way of achieving this goal. The school had a “home-grown” WiFi solution with inconsistent coverage throughout the school building. And the internet service providing the underlying connectivity didn’t deliver enough bandwidth.

Read this case study to learn how, with the help of an E-rate consultant, the school identified telecommunications providers with eligible solutions, and why they ultimately chose Managed WiFi from Spectrum Enterprise.

Located in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, Dare County Schools is a high-performing public school district comprised of 11 schools spanning grades K-12. Committed to ensuring all students have access to the skills and curriculum necessary to cultivate learning, Dare County Schools depends on reliable technology services to provide the online learning resources and tools they need to be successful.

Fortunately, Dare County Schools enjoyed reliable voice and internet capabilities thanks to a combination of PRI Trunking and 1 GB Ethernet service from their long-time partner, Spectrum Enterprise, which had been installed throughout the district years earlier.

However, when Dare County Schools was offered the option to upgrade from a 1 GB Ethernet service to 10 GB, they jumped at the opportunity to set themselves up for continued success in the future.

Dare County Schools decided to extend their partnership with Spectrum Enterprise. As an E-Rate-eligible Telecommunications Provider (ETP), Spectrum Enterprise implicitly understood the E-Rate funding process that would make it affordable for Dare County Schools to upgrade their bandwidth, while staying within their budget restrictions.

The long-tail impact of the COVID-19 pandemic continues in K-12 education, providing rich lessons learned from the experience for both educators and parents and continuing to stimulate new energy around how to improve educational experiences for all students. The jump start for this newfound interest was certainly the seismic jolt to the traditional school paradigm resulting from the shift to virtual learning in most schools and communities due to the pandemic.

As a result of these seismic changes in K-12 education, the classroom looks very different today. But the work of transforming education is still in its infancy, despite the physical changes to the classroom such as more devices for students to use and a greater emphasis on teacher use of digital content in the classroom.

In this third report from Project Tomorrow® and Spectrum Enterprise® in our special series focused on the role of technology in education today, we examine evidence about how the impact of the pandemic and the resulting shifts to more technology-based instruction have forever changed our schools and our classrooms — and why there is no going back.

Learn how Spectrum Enterprise supports key trends in education technology.

Historically, K–12 school systems have taken a “do-it-yourself” approach to deploying and managing their network infrastructure. This DIY model has served school systems well for many years. However, K–12 leaders are starting to rethink this method as they look for ways to solve for a shortage of IT talent.

Education leaders and policymakers continue to analyze the impact on students, teachers, and families of the sudden changes to traditional education caused by the global pandemic. The quest to identify some silver linings from the experience, however, is coupled with a new heightened awareness about the lack of equitable learning in our nation’s schools and the understanding that equity is about more than providing a student with a Chromebook and a hotspot.

This new report from Project Tomorrow and Spectrum highlights how the role of district technology management has expanded beyond the more traditional responsibilities due to the pandemic, and identifies key questions that can help jumpstart important discussions with teachers, administrators, and other stakeholders regarding the new role of technology within the learning experience.