How K12 Technical Directors Handle Security for Online Learning
K12 Cybersecurity Podcast Episode 2: Remote School/Work
In this episode, we discuss with our guest Rod Russeau what it’s like to be a Tech Director in K12 trying to manage remote school and work as well as security for online learning. How are educators adjusting to this new reality?
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Podcast Transcription:
[00:00:29] Ryan Cloutier: Thanks everyone and welcome to the K 12 cybersecurity podcast. I’m your host, Ryan Clowe tear. Really excited to have you guys join us today, we have an amazing guests lined up for you um and what we’re gonna unpack today is kind of the covid 19, what’s its impact to schools? What’s it like to be a tech director right now and and trying to navigate this. Our next guest is a servant leader with a passion for learning and technology. He has served as the Director of Technology and Information Services at Community High School District 99. He’s been there for nearly 24 years recently, he earned his Certified Education Technology Leader designation. Uh This is a accreditation provided by an organization called the national consortium of school networking or cosign for short um for those of us in the know uh he also just recently passed the Certified Information Security Manager exam and is beginning the formal certification process. Our guest has been in technology longer than I’ve been alive. He began his career in 1977 designing programming and supporting student and financial information systems for hundreds of school districts across the country. He is also an avid musician, photographer and as the proud father of two amazing adult sons, Our next guest has a total of 43 years of experience in it with 26 of those years in education. Please welcome to the podcast Rod Russo. Hey Rod, how are you doing today? Thanks for taking time to talk with us.
[00:02:02] Rod Russeau: Hey Ryan, thanks so much for having me. I’m doing great. My, my main question is how did I get sold?
[00:02:10] Ryan Cloutier: I feel that myself as I’m reading through your experience, I’m going, wow, that’s uh, that means I’m, I’m pushing 40. So yeah, it’s uh, I don’t know, I’m guessing through a lot of really hard work and successful accomplishments,
[00:02:26] Rod Russeau: Lot of, lot of 80 hour weeks in the early technology days for sure.
[00:02:31] Ryan Cloutier: Yeah, those, uh, those long days seem to be coming back with all this work from home. Um, speaking of which I know you’re down in Illinois and you guys just got your shelter in place order. How are you feeling about that?
[00:02:44] Rod Russeau: Yeah, it’s been quite a transition. Um, a number of different feelings. I think one is just uh, exhausted really. I think both the work that we’re doing, just trying to support the teaching and the learning that’s going on in the schools and like you indicated earlier, just the transition to work at home environment for somebody that has always worked crazy hours and done some work at home, but not full time at home. So it’s really been exhausting in that way at the, at the same time, it’s been energizing to really, I’m just so proud of the work that our team is done and our district is doing and really all the education community is doing. Um it’s just really gratifying to to see everything that’s being done to support the kids,
[00:03:39] Ryan Cloutier: so with, you know, transitioning to working at home as kind of a full time thing, how has that impacted your day to day? You know? Um some of the things I know that that I’ve been affected by is trying to keep my schedule, you know, keep the same routine as much as I can. What are some of the things that you’re doing to kind of maintain normalcy and insanity if you will with, with kind of being, you know, shelter in place and working from home so much.
[00:04:07] Rod Russeau: Yeah, I I completely understand that. I I find that again, I said I was exhausted before I feel like I’m working more and harder than I do in the office. Not not to suggest, I don’t don’t work hard there, but it is difficult not having really had a home office before really to set those boundaries that says this is my office and then when I step out of that, I step away from work, just like getting in the car, you know, to head home. So that’s that’s been a challenge. I think the other thing that’s been happening in this environment that we’re in now, we’re really are super intent tendon has used the term we’re building this plane as we fly it. You know, we’re having to come up with solutions to problems that we couldn’t have even imagined so that those things are coming at us so quickly that whatever routine I would have had before two, there’s tons of important other work that we’re doing. We more or less had to set a lot of that aside um to really react to these things that are happening. Right, right and left.
[00:05:20] Ryan Cloutier: Yeah, one more
[00:05:21] Rod Russeau: thing I would Sorry Ryan,
[00:05:22] Ryan Cloutier: please go ahead.
[00:05:24] Rod Russeau: No, I 11 other thing that I would say is that one thing that’s really helped with our sanity a little bit is you mentioned Khazen earlier organizations like that, our state chapter of Khazen and just so many of the colleagues that we have through that just the conversations, the virtual conversations and supports have been nonstop really. So that’s really kind of helped keep everybody grounded and we’ve just been sharing a tremendous amount of information.
[00:05:54] Ryan Cloutier: No, that’s really good to hear. You know, you and I had a virtual happy hour just a few nights ago and you know, and I can tell you it is so important to to our mental health. Um we’ve never as a species been through something like we’re going through right now. The way we’re going through it, we’ve lived through pandemics. We’ve had times in our, in our society and our culture in our world where we’ve we’ve faced tough challenges. You know, the a lot of people keep referring back to World War Two as the only corollary um that they can draw to this, Covid, like, well back in World War Two, you know, our grandparents were asked to go and fight and die, and we’re being asked to sit on the couch and watch netflix, right? So try not to screw that up is the message that I’m hearing. Um, but what I don’t think people have really taken into account and it was interesting to hear, you know, you touch on the, the important work we were doing, that’s still important work to be done has been de prioritized because there’s crisis to manage. And I think that’s such an important call out cybersecurity didn’t go away because of covid, if anything, it’s more important now than it’s ever been. Sure. But the reality is if you don’t have devices in the kid’s hands to do distance learning, um, you’ve got a bit of an order of operations problem, right? You need to be able to have devices in the hands, you need to be able to have lunch in the belly and then we can kind of get back to dealing with those lists that we already had of those important issues to address. And um, you know, I I would ask anybody listening, you know, take time to do a virtual get together with your friends with your family, with your colleagues. It is it is so important that while we socially distance physically that we don’t allow that to create actual social distance. Uh, we need each other. We human beings are creatures of social nature. We absolutely need each other. I can tell you as an extrovert. It has been very hard for me um, to get the same degree of energy that I would being in a room of people. But I’ve also heard from my introvert friends who I didn’t think they needed people as much as they are now finding out that they did. Um, so it’s it’s really interesting, you know, to see how different people are navigating this, but I can’t agree more with the we’re all in it together and it’s so important for us to take time to connect with each other. So having said that, knowing the world is different. What is the pre covid activity that you miss the most? And and two second part of that question, What post covid activity are you enjoying the most?
[00:08:43] Rod Russeau: Yeah. Pre covid. I think we’ve talked about it in a variety of ways. It’s just that for me just being able to interact with people face to face. I’m definitely a face to face person. I’m a hugger. You know, I I just love that physical connection with people. Um, and you know, the people you work with especially really become your friends and I have many great friends at work that I miss, you know, that I miss seeing them and like you mentioned earlier, I do play the saxophone and a couple bands and I, I miss those, those rehearsals a lot. I’ve been trying to practice on my own at home, but just being exhausted every night and getting used to this whole work at home thing. It’s, it’s quite honestly, it’s been hard to do much at night other than go out for a nice walker on the block and then crash.
[00:09:38] Ryan Cloutier: Yeah. And I’m glad to hear you’re exercising. That’s such an important thing right now. Um, as we all sit
[00:09:46] Rod Russeau: right, right. And, and just the extension of the face to face. You know, my my wife and I like to entertain and we’d like to socialize with with our friends. So that’s kind of on hold. But I think the thing I’m enjoying the most is actually our best substitute for that at this time is unlike someone who in industry maybe works from home a majority or all of the time that’s quite used to existing in this virtual world. It’s really been, um, of an interesting experience really to kind of be involved and massively injected into that world. You know, I feel like I’m learning a lot and we’re still getting a lot done and doing our best to laugh and depending on the group I’m with wear funny hats and you know, just kind of have a good time at work,
[00:10:43] Ryan Cloutier: definitely. And I know it, security studio, we’ve been doing the same, we’re doing virtual happy hours where we actually just started a couple of new Microsoft teams channels for sleepy pets. Uh, so we’re all sharing our, our sleepy pets, uh, where we’re sharing internet memes, you know, other things to kind of bring levity and humor back into because, you know, one of the things that I’ve noticed and maybe you’ve noticed this as well, you kind of touched on it earlier. You know, when I’m in an office setting, um, a large part of my day is actually social interaction. I, I would argue that a good part of the day is going from meeting to meeting, having a hallway conversation stopping for five minutes and and chatting it up with a colleague about their weekend or about their plans for this upcoming weekend or something like that. Right? And not getting that. Um, I know I found myself, I realized how short of a distance I have from my office to my bathroom and I didn’t, and I didn’t understand how, uh, this just revelation kind of dawned on me this morning. You know, when I’m in my office, it takes me a minute to get to the restroom and it takes me a minute to get back from the restroom and those minutes are so precious to having a moment to breathe, to think about the college is finished or to think about the column about to get on right. It’s just such a, a break. I used to be a smoker for many years. I was a smoker and cigarette breaks were Part feeding an addiction, but they were also part just kind of getting away for five minutes. And as I transitioned away from smoking, I actually found that I still needed to get away for five minutes. Um, so while I, I no longer smoke, um, I still do follow a pretty regular schedule or at least I did pre covid of taking those kind of those smoke breaks if you will, right. Um, just without the cigarettes. And I found that over the last week or two as I’ve been home, um, less now by choice than in the past. I wasn’t getting that five minutes in between bathroom breaks. So I’ve actually made it a point now that if I get up to go to the restroom, my pace around the house at least twice. So I’m not,
[00:13:04] Rod Russeau: yeah, I’m right there with, with you, Ryan, I’ll get up, take a quick break and I find myself coming back very quickly to the computer and I really need to force myself to take a longer break. Walk around the house every time.
[00:13:20] Ryan Cloutier: Yeah. And I’ve learned that too. And you know, one of the things I did today, um, that was really helpful and having a dog actually has helped me tremendously with getting out of the house.
[00:13:31] Rod Russeau: It’s like I may have mentioned earlier, this is such a unique situation. It’s not a snow day that’s just affecting a particular region. It’s something that’s affecting the whole world. So we’re all in it literally together.
[00:13:45] Ryan Cloutier: We are. And you know, I can’t stress this enough. You know, please stay home. I fully believe that the listeners of this podcast are well intentioned and reasonable, intelligent human beings. Um, but you may be sharing a home with those that aren’t or you may, you may know some people in your community that need a gentle nudge and reminder that, you know, we are all in this together and we all have to do our part and make our sacrifices and to that end, you know, what are, what are kind of the bigger challenges, um, from the school side, you know, from your administration, as you guys are making sacrifices and decisions about, you know, what’s in the best interests of the students and the staff. What are kind of the biggest challenges that you’re, you’re hearing come kind of down from the administration.
[00:14:32] Rod Russeau: Sure, sure. One I kind of mentioned earlier what our superintendent calls building the plane as we fly it. There’s just constantly, we’re just, there’s so much change being thrown at us and so many unknowns. So we’re literally trying to react to what we just became aware of today, trying to anticipate what we might hear about tomorrow and what if this happens in the next week. So there’s just been, um, a constant flow of information if you will, whether it’s from the federal government, our state government, local, state board of add and all of our staff. There’s been a whole side of this that that may be a lot of people didn’t didn’t expect or wouldn’t realize. But we are and school school districts are providing food service to students that need food during this time. Initially, that was just targeted for our free and reduced lunch students And it’s since expanded basically anybody under 18 in our community that needs food. We’re providing food and I I’m I’m only assisting with that. And our team is from the technical side to kind of collect data and integrate data with our student information system and such. There’s just some amazing leadership and amazing volunteering is being done in the district and the schools too coordinate this. It’s a huge, huge effort that when we think about schools being closed at this time, it’s like, whoa, would have never thought about that. But it’s just been a tremendous service to those fam families and I just can’t say enough for all the good work that’s been done to make that happen. It’s just been amazing.
[00:16:30] Ryan Cloutier: Well, I absolutely think that’s that’s so awesome of your, of your district to do. I know for me that has been actually one of the most eye opening pieces of this was the amount of people in our communities that, that food is a concern. I mean, I, I knew that people went hungry and I knew that we had free and reduced lunch programs. I think I was a little taken aback at the volume of, of need. And you know, um, I really hope at the end of this, you know, we as a society recognize that, you know, schools, uh, you know, for a lot of these kids, that’s the only meals are getting and that, that was just, it’s such an eye opening and uh, well, you know, it’s a little sad to, it kind of hurts. I didn’t know the need was there. Uh, I know I’m using that as an opportunity to be better to use as an opportunity to, to give more to my local food shelves just to see if I can get involved as a, as a child who grew up with food being a concern. Um, I can tell you, I can personally relate to that story. And even then when I, when it was, you know, something I was personally living through, I I guess I didn’t fully grasp that. I, you know, kind of maybe at times felt alone. I didn’t, I didn’t know that we’re talking about some serious percentages of the community in some cases. I know, and I don’t, I don’t want you to reveal your particular districts percentages, but, you know, I talk every day with, you know, tech directors and, and, and see IOS and C T O s from, from all over the country, um, in K 12 and I’ve got to say what you said. Uh, it seems to be unfortunately a pretty strong theme. So as I’ve been talking to the C I O S and C T O. S and Tec directors and saying, hey, what, you know, what are the big challenges? The answer is Ryan, we got to get food in their belly. We’ve got to feed the kids. Oh, and we need a hot spot in the laptop. Right? And so I’m really glad to see that. Yeah, but I’m glad to see the right order of priority there. Right? Um, so for me to you, I mean a big thank you for, for the effort and the hard work that, that you’re putting in to help contribute to that in a huge thank you to your district and all the districts across this country that are, are really putting that food service. Uh, first and foremost, um, I’ve really seen that I’ve seen that a lot on social media. Um, yeah. You know, and to that end, um, one of the other things that I’ve heard about, and I’m curious to get your thoughts on, um, you know, equity and access is a huge conversation right now. Um, are you guys experiencing any challenges with that? Are you kind of doing a Wifi hotspot distribution program? Maybe for some of the underserved population that maybe doesn’t have home internet access. Can you tell me a little bit more about what that looks like for you and some of the steps you are taking to kind of mitigate that concern.
[00:19:32] Rod Russeau: Sure, sure. Yeah. That’s always been a concern. We’ve been a 1 1 district with chromebooks for five or 6 years now and connectivity obviously is essential to make that work. And we’re lucky that we live in an area where a majority of our students have access at home for those that don’t we. Um for quite a few years now we through the connect ed Grant. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the connected Grant and Sprint, but we’ve offered hotspots, um quite a number of that we were able to secure with that grant and we actually have some left that we’ve actually used right now to take care of a few needs that we had for the most part. I we’re in good shape shape with that. But I know that has been a that it’s just a continual challenge. The the other thing we’ve done is we’ve put some information online for families, whether it’s through Comcast has their internet essentials program and a number of providers have programs where families can get very, very low cost access. And a lot of those companies, given the COVID-19 situation have extended extended special offers to make that even easier. So we put that information out there as well as I know a lot of other districts have.
[00:21:05] Ryan Cloutier: That’s that’s awesome. And I’m so glad to see the providers right? The I. S. P. S. Really pony up and you know I know what I pay per month for my internet. So please take a few of those extra dollars that you build me for uh and put them towards a good cause. So it’s it’s good to see that happening. So you had kind of mentioned you know uh making you know parents aware of resources. One of the other big challenges that I hear a lot about right now is is the messaging of communication. Um Covid is providing an information overload uh and for for listeners who work in the information security industry, you know that information overload is part of the job requirement. Um It is absolutely what we have to do. We’re constantly keeping up with all the changing stuff. What I’ve noticed personally is doing that in addition with being a regular human in the world and just trying to keep myself informed about this covid situation. I’m finding that I’m getting a little bit overwhelmed um with information and and and it’s it’s okay it’s presenting its own challenges. Um because now you know I have my my full time responsibility of keeping up with all the cyber threats. But now I have an obligation to myself to my family and my community to also be aware of kind of these covid threats. And so when you’re communicating to staff and parents, how are you kind of controlling that information overload?
[00:22:37] Rod Russeau: That’s, that’s a great question. We realized early on that, that was important. We, we have a communications director in our district and most most do now with the communications needs. What we do is we have an administrative, a virtual administrative team meeting each day now. And part of that meeting is we have collaborative documents that that we share and one of those contains here are things that we think it’s important that our staff knows our students, our community knows and we talk about those as an administrative team. One thing that we wanted to do was not have be sending out, oh, this is really important about technology and someone sending out. This is a great educational resource and remember about the food deliveries to try to consolidate those communications. Um, so that they’re getting kind of everything in one place from one source. It’s not necessarily reducing the size of the messages and we’ve almost had to apologize for the length of some of them and really encourage people to read the whole thing. It’s important information. But knowing the number of emails that I get every day and I’m sure you and everyone else does. Um, we, we don’t want to contribute to that, but at the same time we want to make it so that people know, hey, this is the email with all the information you need. Please please read it.
[00:24:21] Ryan Cloutier: Well that’s good. I think you know, every little bit right now helps and and there’s a lot to know. Um So it’s hard not to get overwhelmed, you know. Uh And that kind of leads me to my next thing about overwhelmed. Um So we hear every day on the news now about supply chain concerns. We hear about, you know, do we have enough ventilators? Do we have enough masks? Um Can we produce enough? Do we have enough of the raw material? One of the, one of the biggest issues I heard about between last night and today is the lack of re agent um which is the chemical compounds that they use to actually do the Covid testing. So they swab your nose and then they’ve got, you know, these chemical compounds that help them to see whether or not you you have Covid and they call that a re agent clearly as you can tell, not a chemistry major. I don’t know the first thing about it, but I I hear that they don’t have enough. And then that kind of prompted me to think about, well, what other supply chain concerns are we having? I know that chromebooks are are very hard to come by right now um because they’re being purchased in the very large volumes and and a lot of our technology is actually manufactured in china. And so because they had to shut down to deal with Covid because there’s a lot of, um, travel restrictions, shipping restrictions, etcetera, etcetera. Um, and reasonably so. And given the situation we’re in. But what are you, what are you seeing for kind of supply chain concerns within your district?
[00:25:59] Rod Russeau: Yeah, you’re, you’re exactly right Ryan. We, um, certainly the Chromebook issue is big for us. We buy a, a whole new batch of those every, every summer for our incoming students. We’ve already been in communication with some of our key suppliers that we’ve used in the past to just start to get an idea of what those supply chains look like, what their lead times are too, really activate that process earlier than what we have in the past. We’re not at the point based on what we’ve heard that were in dire straits and I think we’ll be fine but definitely need to start having those conversations now if people haven’t had them yet because depending on what you’re looking to get and when you’re looking to get it, that landscape could look a lot different. We also have a major construction project going on in our district that goes actually through the end of next summer. And there’s just a tremendous amount of work this summer that’s going to be done. So I’m not directly involved in the acquisition of materials for that. But I know that that’s just a major concern in our district and probably any district that’s doing a major initiative like like that to make sure that all those materials are available when they need to be.
[00:27:25] Ryan Cloutier: Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see the impact. Um I have some friends in the construction industry and and right now they’re um they’re still working pretty well. Um but there is uh you know, kind of a shift if you will. Uh several of them have been contacted by different hospitals to assist in the reconfiguration uh to accommodate, you know, the increased number of beds that we need and other things like that. So I’d be curious to see as the coming months play out what the impact is on those projects, not just from a supply chain but also from a labour availability obviously, you know, in this time um we’re all focused on, you know, trying to keep our community safe. You know, we want to limit the amount of um mortality is that we experience from this event. Um Yeah, that’ll that’ll be an interesting one to keep the eye on, you know, and and having said all that, I mean that takes me to this point, the world didn’t stop moving just because covid happened didn’t didn’t stop. I mean I know it feels a lot like the world stopped. Um but it didn’t and to that point neither did the cybercriminals as a matter of fact they’ve increased their activity, their activities at one of the highest levels that we’ve seen in some time and you know, one of the challenges as a security professional that that I’m facing every day and I think you you share this, this challenge as well as probably every tech director in the United States does, how am I keeping a focus on ransomware and phishing and privacy and all these things that I was talking about prior to this, covid and uh you know, how, how am I gonna, you know, do this? How am I going to continue to raise the awareness without giving information overload and all of that? Uh, knowing that actually my, my staff and my students are more at risk now than they were say four weeks ago. What are your thoughts on that? What can parents be doing to kind of help secure the home network?
[00:29:34] Rod Russeau: Yeah, but just to talk about that real quick Ryan, is that we right when we were at the point realizing that we were going to shut down, we’ve been um using a product for many years now to conduct phishing campaigns, phishing awareness campaigns with our staff to really try to reduce the likelihood that a staff member is going to click on a bad link or open a bad file and we talked about should we suspend those during this time, people are going to be under a lot of stress and at home we ultimately decided to keep those going much to your point that yes, it’s inconvenient, but so is it inconvenient if you got France somewhere? So we really wanted to make to make sure that that kept going and in many of the administrative conversations that I’m in, I I just have to kind of keep that in the forefront of everybody’s mind that this is important. We really need people to be on high alert because there is just so many bad actors out there that want to take advantage of this time. People’s fears, people’s good hearts and uh we’ve got enough on our plates right now. We don’t need to be trying to deal with a ransomware attack at the same time.
[00:31:01] Ryan Cloutier: Yeah, and you know, in the security community, um actually there was a news story I want to say is two, maybe three days ago, but basically uh we have seen cybercriminals, you know, ransom wearing hospitals and that caused a bit of an uproar in the good guy cybersecurity community. Um we’re not really happy about that. And some more vocal people kind of took to the internet to say, look, you gotta knock it off because we’re probably going to get a little more serious than we happen about trying to find you about trying to come after you. Um you know, I wish criminals would be not criminals. Um obviously that’s wishful thinking, they’re criminals for a reason, but you know, one of the things we’ve done here at security studio to, to kind of help with that is is we began to develop some free resources for parents, business leaders, school leaders, community members on some basic things they can be doing at home to increase their home security, you know, updating devices, updating routers, antivirus. Um, you know how to, how to do those things. Um, you know, the old adage remains true right? Have good passwords by that. I mean pass phrases. Um, you know, use a VPN virtual private network. But some interesting things have come out of this and, and in closing these will be the last couple questions I have for you Rod because I do want to respect your time. Um, and the audience is time as well. But you know, video backgrounds, it’s something I’ve been preaching for years but really didn’t get a lot of traction on because you know, people like, ah, yeah, but what’s the risk? But, but now I’m starting to see an uncomfortable trend of grade school teachers taking photographs of the entire class on a zoom meeting and then posting it to twitter. Um, and in some cases exposing things in the background that maybe mom and dad aren’t comfortable with being put on twitter. Um, you know, you’re starting to see some, some different things, you know about people’s personal taste and home hygiene habits and and other things that maybe we weren’t privy to before. Um, what’s the guidance that you’re giving parents um, and staff on, on kind of being aware of of what’s in the background before you turn the webcam on
[00:33:30] Rod Russeau: Right. That’s exactly it. That exact guidance really is to really be aware of of of what is in that background both, what what information are you sharing that you don’t don’t want shared that you might not want shared and from the staff side of things, data privacy is just so important. And especially in the state of Illinois, other states either already have or I’m sure we’ll be moving in this direction in a year. We’re going to have some pretty stringent requirements that schools will be very transparent about the companies that we do business with, the data that we share and just a tremendous amount of information around around that. So data privacy and our control over that is just more important than ever. And we’ve messaged out to staff in a number of ways just to be especially vigilant around that. Both from like you mentioned, the sharing of screens, make sure that just like you wouldn’t be posting pictures of students on social media unless you were sure that they were students that agreed that that was ok. Okay to do and at the same time, another thing that’s been happening is the software companies, I think for a lot of good reasons and are sending out offers for software to sign up for a trial to get a free license for your district and while I really appreciate the offers in many cases, I also, I also realized that in some cases it’s a marketing opportunity for them as well. And unfortunately sometimes teachers might get a hold of that and we’ve tried to communicate out to our staff, there is a process that they go through in our, in our district that make sure those are vetted, make sure that we look at it from a number of lenses. But I’m afraid in some cases people could just be signing up for things and maybe even sharing data that they shouldn’t be.
[00:35:46] Ryan Cloutier: Yeah, that that’s a concern I think globally right now, right. Um as we scramble to adopt new technological solutions for, you know, working remote and productivity solutions and you know, I’m hearing that on all fronts that that is a huge concern and that actually kind of leads me to my last point here. Um so content filtering and for those of you that aren’t familiar. The easiest way to summarize this is content filtering is how schools generally try to keep the quote unquote bad parts of the internet away from kids think of that as the adult sites. Um, other, you know, sites that maybe have not school appropriate content on them. Um, not all those products behave equally and some of those products aren’t set up for distance learning. Um how are you communicating to parents that that kind of additional responsibility if you will or or just maybe letting them know, hey look, we, we have this solution on campus, but off campus is, doesn’t work so well, what, what does that kind of look like for you guys right now?
[00:36:55] Rod Russeau: Yeah, we’re fortunate in that way Ryan, where are chrome books the students use, they, they’re filtered at home or when they’re not at campus in the same way that they’re filtered when they’re on campus. So we feel pretty good about that from a chromebook perspective, knowing however that students could be still using other computers. We, we tried to make parents aware aware of that in there were, um, In the state of Illinois, the way districts are broken up is different than some, we have some unit districts, K 12, Some that only serve K8 and some that only serve high school students. We’re a high school student district and therefore our content filtering rules while we definitely still keep students away from the bad stuff are probably more lax than you would find a kindergartner being able to access. So it’s still a big concern of ours. We feel like we’ve got it handled well by the way we manage the chromebooks with that extra level of awareness for parents as they venture off onto other devices.
[00:38:10] Ryan Cloutier: That’s awesome and you know, keep up the good work there. You know, I think this is a, is an opportunity to help mom and dad, um, or whoever, the caregiver maybe start to realize they do have an active role to play uh, in the digital safety of their kids. Um, you know, and now more than ever we need to be reminded to be extra vigilant. We need to, we need to take time to slow down a little bit. Let’s check. So I was saying trust but verify, um, let’s double check before we double click and you know, when in doubt throw it out. That’s a, that’s a good one from homeland security. Well, Rod, I, I can’t thank you enough. Uh, you know, first and foremost for the friendship, but also for, for taking time to get on the horn with us and really talk through this. Um, you know, we’re going to continue to do these. I would ask our audience members that are listening, you know, feel free to reach out to us. Um, you can find us @StudioSecurity on twitter. So Rod, what’s a, what’s a good way for folks to get a hold of you if you have follow up questions
[00:39:21] Rod Russeau: Sure, Ryan, yeah, folks get ahold of me at, @RodRusseau on twitter.
[00:39:25] Ryan Cloutier: Excellent, Well thank you so much for taking time to meet with us today and and to chat about this. Um, this has been great and you know, tell the listeners out there. Um, you know, have a good day, stay safe, stay healthy. We’ll continue to make content for you, please do, reach out to us at studio security dot uh, on twitter and let us know um, what topics you’d like to see us cover.
[00:39:50] Rod Russeau: Hey Ryan, I just wanted to thank you so much for having me on today. It’s been great talking with you. Um, and uh look forward to doing a lot more good work with you and the whole security realm.
[00:40:03] Ryan Cloutier: Hey Rod, thank you. It has truly been awesome. We will do this again soon and with that, I’ll close the podcast. Have a great day, everyone.
