"It's just next to impossible to stop someone," George Grant, a leader with the Nashville Presbytery connected to The Covenant School, told AP News regarding intruders wielding high-powered assault rifles.
"Finally, we have a framework, rubric and training designed for education," said Frankie Jackson, project lead for the Cybersecurity Rubric for Education. "Schools can expose risks and create a strategic plan to improve cybersecurity."
Education advocacy groups have pleaded with the Federal Communications Commission to modernize E-rate funding to better support districts as financially driven cybercriminals continue to target K12 schools.
The chances of being sexually assaulted, threatened with a weapon, bullied, or exposed to illegal drugs are among the key safety measurements being tracked.
Over the past six months, many districts have fallen victim to falsified threats. According to one safety expert, they appear to be linked to one another and originate from international sources.
Suicide screening and other K12 interventions have faced opposition from those who argue such approaches risk inciting self-harm among students. But new research has found just the opposite.
"The secret is out: K12s are a target-rich and resource-poor sector," says TJ Sayers, cyber threat intelligence manager at the Center for Internet Security (CIS). "Maintaining complete, secured, and offline backups is the single-most effective way to recover from most attacks, including ransomware."
With a shortage of school counselors and incidents of self-harm and violence toward others surging this past year, districts are turning toward online monitoring services that can help administrators stay ahead of the curve.
Between 2016 and 2020, there has been a total of 173 mass shootings in the U.S. Among those, 13 have occurred within educational institutions, making this sector the third-most targeted.
