Cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and diversity are three of the top issues in K12 IT departments. They are also the big themes longtime IT leader Sandra Paul will cover at next month’s FETC conference in Orlando.
Paul recently retired as director of information technology and operations at Township of Union Public Schools in New Jersey. She encouraged her team to continue to adopt artificial intelligence to advance operational and instructional efficiency.
“As far as the future, it’s understanding the possibility of AI from both sides of the fence—the infrastructure side and the instructional side, and how it would be able to help them as an IT team to do their jobs more efficiently,” she says. “But I also warned them that there are a lot of things that could happen using AI.”
FETC 2025: How to grow when things don’t go our way
AT FETC, Paul will engage her audience in her two passions: cybersecurity and diversity. “I will be discussing some of the challenges that I’ve had being a director of technology and being female, and some of the situations I was placed in that were absolutely wonderful.”
Throughout her career, she has worked to energize girls in STEM, coding and other tech fields. She has had students help build databases, repair machinery and code websites. “It’s showing them those different avenues of technology, showing them that technology is not just computer science,” she points out. “It’s also media. It’s also the engineering aspects. There are a lot of avenues in technology that I wanted females to understand.”
On the cybersecurity side, she warns that K12 schools have become the No. 1 target for hackers and other cybercriminals.
“The probability of a school being hacked nowadays is close to 90%,” she explains. “School districts are the primary focus of hackers due to the lack of financial and physical resources to prevent these types of situations. But there are things we can do to ensure that our systems and network are as secure as possible.”
Sandra Paul’s FETC Sessions
FETC 2025 takes place Jan. 14-17 in Orlando. Here’s a rundown of Sandra Paul’s sessions:
- Cybersecurity: Hacking Education
- AI: Data Privacy, Security and Cybersecurity
- Diversity/Equity in IT: A Personal Story
- Engaging Students After School with STEM Programs
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