I’ve had many conversations with my wife, a 4th grade teacher in the district where I was previously CIO, about a new edtech tool and it always ends with a simple question; am I allowed to use this? Is it FERPA compliant? If there’s one thing I’ve learned from marriage, it’s never answer a question with a question but unfortunately that’s hard to do when it comes to FERPA, so let’s talk about how we can bring clarity to this topic…while also reducing the stress in my own household.

Here’s the problem: for a tool, software, or other edtech product the phrase “FERPA compliant” is not really an accurate statement. It’s like buying a car that is advertised as “driver’s license compliant”. Sure, you need brakes to be able to stop at traffic lights but running a red light is typically not the fault of your car if you run a red light. FERPA is a law that governs the driver

What FERPA Actually Is

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (1974) is a rights law, not a data security law. Before 1974, schools could decide who they wanted to share student records with and could also withhold parental access. Imagine your surprise as a parent when the local sheriff shows up with your child’s attendance records, which you didn’t have any rights to! FERPA came at a time when the country was in need of stronger records laws (ahem…Watergate) and the primary goal was to ensure parental access and notification. FERPA applies to educational agencies and institutions that receive federal education funding, which is essentially every public school district and even some private institutions. It gives parents (and students, once they turn 18 or enroll in postsecondary education) three core rights:

• The right to inspect and review their child’s education records

• The right to request amendment of records that are inaccurate or misleading

• The right to consent before the school discloses personally identifiable information from education records, subject to a list of exceptions

The last item is the most important part and is one that has become very difficult with the advent of technology. Before we get into that, notice what’s missing. FERPA does not mandate encryption standards. It does not require breach notification. It does not specify retention schedules, penetration testing, or multi-factor authentication. It was written to ensure parental rights so you need to think of any security measures as being in support of those three tenets.

Notice also who the law applies to. Every obligation in FERPA falls on the educational institution. A software company, on its own, has no FERPA obligations at all. FERPA only reaches a vendor through a specific doorway, which I’ll get to in a second.

So why has the phrase “FERPA compliant” made its way into so many district RFPs and sales decks? Because districts need to be able to stay in compliance with these parental rights, and that means that educational records in a Google Doc, math app, or assessment platform need to be accessible to the district, amendable when needed, and accessible only to those with the right to have access. So here’s where edtech vendors & partners come into the picture.

The “School Official” Designation: How Vendors Get Inside FERPA

Who can have access to school records? Obviously school and district staff need to have access to student information. This doesn’t mean that every staff member gets access to every record; the person needs to have a legitimate educational interest.

But districts can’t do everything themselves and FERPA understands that districts will need to work with outside providers. Schools have to outsource things like school bus operations, special education services, and technology. This is why FERPA has the “school official exemption” to allow student information to be shared to an outside party. A district can disclose education records (without parental consent) to a party it designates as a school official, provided that party:

• Performs an institutional service or function for which the district would otherwise use its own employees

• Is under the direct control of the district with respect to the use and maintenance of the records

• Has a legitimate educational interest in the records

• Uses the records only for the purposes for which they were disclosed, and doesn’t re-disclose them

Your learning management system provider, your SIS, your reading intervention platform: they access student records legally because your district designated them as school officials, put them under your direct control (usually via contract), and defined their legitimate educational interest.

This means two things that we routinely get backwards:

First, the designation is the district’s responsibility to make and defend. Before a district can share records with someone outside the building, they need to ensure the four requirements above can be met and, most importantly, they remain in direct control of the records. FERPA doesn’t specify how, but districts often do this through a contract and/or data sharing agreement.

Second, when a designated vendor mishandles data, the FERPA violation belongs to the district. The Department of Education doesn’t investigate the vendor. It investigates the district because they are the funded institution that FERPA actually governs. FERPA can only investigate the district, who is supposed to be in direct control of the records.

So here’s where it gets foggy.

Once you understand the “school official” designation, the next question is where it gets interesting. How does an outside vendor or person receive designation as a school official, and who in the district can make that decision? Districts have certain obligations for notification to parents but FERPA does not actually say who has the authority to apply the school official designation in a district.

FERPA’s ultimate enforcement mechanism is federal funding, so the Department of Education can’t do anything to an individual or a vendor if something goes wrong – only the district/school. Ultimately, it is the district’s governing body (school board, Superintendent, CEO) that is responsible for determining the “school official” but this is not written in stone anywhere. You can’t search a database of authorized school district officials to find out if a teacher, principal, or CTO is authorized to sign an agreement with a provider.

Most outside providers are paid, so the act of signing a contract with that provider is the normal way that a district authorizes that provider as being a school official. The contract is the binding agreement that allows the district to stay in compliance with FERPA and hopefully that contract spells out the school official designation, provider responsibilities and consequences.

So here’s the burning question… can a teacher sign up for a free edtech app online and essentially designate that edtech provider as a “school official”? Most school & district employees recognize they cannot sign a contract but what happens when there is no contract, as is the case with many free edtech apps? It ultimately comes down to the district being able to maintain direct control of the data and many states have clarified this to mean that the district must have an agreement in place, even if the outside provider is offering a free service.

As I said in the beginning, my intent is not to negatively call out people, companies, or districts with this – we all need to work together to understand this complex law. But I want to demonstrate how this commonly works through an example that recently re-ignited this conversation, which is Anthropic’s Claude for Teachers. Anthropic’s announcement references that their K-12 Data Processing Addendum is “written to comply with FERPA.”

But when you click into the terms and actually read the fine print, you’ll see how Anthropic addresses the “school official” exemption.

School Boards and Superintendents typically do not give teachers the legal authority to bind the school into contracts or agreements but when a teacher signs up for a free service like this, the accountability still rests with the district. More and more states and districts are clarifying this in State laws and policies and that’s coming out in the form of district vetting processes and procedures, which shows in CoSN’s 2026 State of Edtech report this year.

This is where I want to get back to my opening statement; this is not a criticism of any single person, district, edtech provider, or Anthropic – this is a common practice in K-12 that has evolved because FERPA was never designed for the current landscape we’re in. It was written in 1974 to address parental rights & privacy and we’ve had to adapt this to education technology.

But what about AI?

The school official exception is already the most misunderstood part of FERPA, and generative AI just added a small complication. At the heart of it, the school district needs to maintain direct control, and records can only be used for their intended purpose under which disclosure was made. This makes it virtually impossible to justify using educational data for training AI models, which many states have already addressed in data privacy laws & regulations.

This is why most consumer AI tools are off the table. School staff, partners, vendors, etc., may only use AI tools that are sandboxed. Every time I run a training for teachers, I start with a big warning that Gemini with your Gmail account may look just like Gemini with your school account but there’s a very big difference between the two behind the scenes.

The Enforcement Reality Check

Now for the part that makes some privacy advocates wince, but district leaders deserve honesty: in more than fifty years, the U.S. Department of Education has never withdrawn federal funding from any school or district for a FERPA violation. Not once.

The statute only permits that penalty when an institution has a policy or practice of violating FERPA, and compliance “cannot be secured by voluntary means.” A single incident almost never qualifies, and the Department’s entire enforcement posture is built around voluntary corrective action, not punishment. To further push the issue, the 2002 Gonzaga v. Doe decision by the U.S. Supreme Court held that parents and students cannot sue for damages under FERPA.

I don’t want to push the narrative that FERPA is optional or unenforceable. The Department’s Student Privacy Policy Office investigates complaints, issues findings, and requires corrective action plans. In 2025, it opened a wave of investigations, including state-level inquiries in California and Maine. Nobody lost funding, but districts spent months producing records, revising policies, and dealing with embarrassing headlines. This is also where states step in to fill the gaps. State-specific student privacy laws often do carry penalties and private rights of action. State attorneys general have gotten active, and the reputational cost of a student data incident carries more weight than federal FERPA enforcement.

Leadership Takeaways

• Clarify your school official designation. Do you have a formal process for designating someone as a “school official” and, more importantly, is this something that staff are familiar with?

• Change the question you ask vendors. Drop “Are you FERPA compliant?” from your RFPs and instead ask, “Are you prepared to operate as a school official under our direct control? Will you sign our data privacy agreement? Which applicable laws (COPPA, our state’s student privacy statute) apply to you directly, and how do you comply with those?” The answers will tell you far more.

• Get ahead of shadow AI. Give staff a district-licensed AI tool with a signed DPA and a no-training clause, then say plainly what the alternative costs: student data pasted into a consumer chatbot is an unauthorized disclosure that the district, not the teacher, will answer for. A sanctioned tool plus clear training beats a prohibition memo every time.

• Vendors: fix your trust page. If you sell to schools, replace the “FERPA Compliant” badge with language about supporting district compliance and operating as a school official. It’s more accurate; it signals you actually understand the law, and the procurement directors who know the difference will notice.

So LAUSD went for it, and if your district is wondering whether to follow, I want to give you a more useful answer than “yes” or “no.” I am not taking a hard stance on this policy - this is not meant to be a criticism or an approval. My goal in this article is to think through the potential repercussions for districts considering doing the same.

For those who haven’t had a chance to read the full document, here is a quick summary of what LAUSD adopted in their screentime policy.

• Grade-span screen time limits. The policy establishes maximum daily and weekly in-school screen time by grade level, including homework. Early Education through Grade 1: zero minutes. Grades 2-5: up to 60 minutes per day or 300 minutes per week. Grades 6-12: up to 120 minutes per day or 600 minutes per week. Limits are phased in across the 2026-27 school year.

• Device access changes. District-issued 1:1 devices are eliminated for Early Education through Grade 1, with exceptions for mandated assessments, IEP requirements, and students enrolled in LAUSD’s Virtual Academy program. Grades 2-5 are encouraged to shift to shared laptop carts and computer labs rather than 1:1 devices. Grades 6-12 retain the 1:1 model.

• No devices during non-instructional time. Elementary and middle school students may not use District-issued devices during passing periods, lunch, or recess, with limited exceptions for school-approved work. Device use during Physical Education is generally prohibited.

• Platform and content restrictions. The District will block student-led access to YouTube, social media, streaming platforms, and non-approved gaming platforms on all District devices. Exceptions require explicit educator direction tied to curriculum-aligned learning objectives.

• Parental rights and consent. Parents must opt in for their child to take a District-issued device home. If they decline, schools must provide analog alternatives.

• Generative AI restrictions. Access to approved generative AI tools is limited to students age 13 and older and must support clearly defined educational purposes with teacher direction.

• Equity exemptions. Students with IEPs, Section 504 Plans, and English Learners are exempt from blanket restrictions. Assistive technology, including AAC devices, speech-to-text tools, and other accessibility supports, remains fully available regardless of grade-span limits.

• Implementation budget. The policy carries an estimated cost of $4 million for laptop carts, $1 million annually for a device monitoring and classroom management tool, and $250,000 for analytics dashboards plus $50,000 per year in ongoing storage costs. No professional development funding is included.

• Accountability. The policy will be reviewed annually at a public Board of Education meeting, with the first review to include educator feedback on implementation.

The Graduated Structure Is Right, and the Research Backs It Up

The foundational architecture of this policy is sound. LAUSD adopted a graduated policy with 4 different grade-band definitions. This graduated structure aligns with what the research actually says; younger children are more vulnerable to the negative effects of unstructured or unsupervised screen exposure. Adult co-engagement is a protective factor in the early ages and, as students develop greater self-regulatory capacity, they can handle more independent device use.

LAUSD also gets the equity carve-outs right. The policy explicitly exempts students with IEPs, Section 504 Plans, and English Learners from blanket restrictions, preserving access to assistive technology including AAC devices, speech-to-text tools, and other accessibility supports. Any screen time policy that does not include these protections is not ready to be adopted.

If you are building a screen time policy from scratch, start with the graduated structure and the equity exemptions. Those are the two things most worth borrowing from what LAUSD has done.

Hard Limits Are Solving the Wrong Problem

Here is the argument I do not hear being made loudly enough in this national conversation: screen time is not the root of the issue. The problem is the specific type of technology that is designed to be addicting, manipulative, and developmentally harmful that has led to excessive screen time.

YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and the algorithmic recommendation engines that power them are engineered to maximize engagement. They are designed to capture and hold attention by exploiting the same dopamine pathways that make gambling compelling. The U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on screen time, and most of the peer-reviewed literature underneath it, is primarily concerned with this category of consumer technology.

But hard time limits apply equally to all screen time, whether it is a student passively watching a video or a student spending 50 minutes carefully revising an essay in Google Docs.

And this is where the policy logic starts to work against itself. When you set a hard minute cap, you create pressure toward whatever is fastest and most efficient. A student who has 30 minutes to complete a task will gravitate toward the tool that gets it done quickest. The most engaging, most efficient tools are very often the most algorithmically optimized ones, which are exactly the ones we should be most concerned about.

Consider a different scenario. A student is working on a draft of a personal essay. She reads a paragraph aloud, crosses out a word, tries another, reads it again. She looks up a word’s etymology because she is curious whether it carries the connotation she wants. She sits with the piece. That process takes 55 minutes. Under LAUSD’s policy for grades 2-5, she has used up most of the weekly screen time budget on one assignment.

Now consider the student next to her who opens the same draft, pastes it into an AI writing tool, accepts the suggested edits, and is done in 12 minutes. That student is “doing better” under a time-based framework.

We want students to develop a slow, deliberate, purposeful relationship with technology. Hard time limits reward the opposite. They optimize for speed and efficiency, and the technologies best suited to speed and efficiency are precisely the ones we should be most cautious about putting in front of students.

The better question is not “how long is the student on the device?” It is “what is the student doing, and does the technology serve that goal or subvert it?”

I am not saying that hard screen time caps are entirely bad, but this type of policy can be dangerous if used in isolation.

The Budget Reveals the Real Priority

If you want to know what a district actually believes, look at the budget. LAUSD’s implementation budget includes $4 million for laptop carts, $1 million annually for a monitoring and classroom management tool, and $250,000 for analytics dashboards. The staffing line reads: “Existing staff will provide technical and operational support.”

There is no professional development budget. Not one dollar.

Here is why that matters. LAUSD’s own research appendix states that professional development and teacher integration practices predict whether technology yields benefits. The district consideration that follows says explicitly that district guidance and professional learning should clearly position digital tools as supplements to core instruction, not replacements.

The research arm says teacher practice is the key variable. The budget allocates $1 million to monitor devices and zero dollars to develop the educators who are supposed to be making better instructional decisions. If your district follows this model, you will spend real money measuring compliance while declining to invest in the only lever that actually moves student outcomes.

The budget also lacks any mention of “offline” experiences. Parents are asking districts to put the devices away so that children can spend more time outdoors, on field trips, and on tangible activities. Over $5M is being spent on administration of this policy but none of that is for student-facing materials or experiences.

The Assessment Question Is Bigger Than Early Childhood

If your district is considering a similar policy, pay close attention to how you define the assessment exemption, and do not assume this issue is confined to your youngest learners.

LAUSD eliminates student device use in Early Education through Grade 1, with a narrow exemption for mandated assessments and IEP requirements. The policy states that device carts remain available for those purposes. But the word “mandated” is doing a lot of work here, and the policy does not define it precisely.

Digital assessment has moved substantially upstream. Adaptive diagnostic tools like i-Ready, MAP, DIBELS, and FastBridge are in use across elementary and middle school grades, often selected at the school or teacher level rather than mandated by the district. Teachers also use Google Forms as “exit tickets” to measure how each student grasped the day’s lesson objectives. Whether those tools qualify under the assessment exemption is entirely unclear. If they do not, teachers from kindergarten through eighth grade are looking at a significant operational regression in how they measure student progress.

LAUSD will almost certainly need clarifying administrative guidance before August 2026 to resolve these questions. If you are writing policy for your own district, do not leave this ambiguity in the document. Define “mandated assessment” explicitly and specify whether district-selected diagnostic platforms qualify for the exemption across all grade levels, not just the youngest. Without this consideration, you are trading devices for increased assessment time and delayed results as teachers switch back to paper/pencil assessments.

Turning Off the Screens at School Will Not Fix the Problem

This is the version of the digital divide argument that is not getting enough attention.

Most of the screen time research, and the U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory that informed LAUSD’s policy, is concerned with consumer technology: passive streaming, social media, algorithmic feeds. That concern is legitimate, but we know that students (particularly those with access to their own unsupervised cell phone) are already using this technology extensively outside of school. For many students, structured, teacher-supervised use of tech in the classroom is where they learn how technology is more than just “like and subscribe.”

When we remove structured, teacher-supervised technology use from the school day, what we are actually doing for those students is ensuring that 100 percent of their technology diet is consumer technology. School was the place where they encountered an adult who could say: “Here is a different way to use this tool. Here is what technology looks like when it serves you rather than exploits you.” If we eliminate that opportunity in the name of reducing screen time, we are not solving the problem. We are removing ourselves from the conversation at the exact moment when our presence matters most.

The digital divide is not only about access to hardware. It is about access to informed adults who can model healthy, productive technology use. For districts that follow LAUSD into broad screen time restrictions without simultaneously investing in digital literacy instruction, the risk is not just that some students will fall behind academically. It is that some students will arrive at adulthood having had their technology habits shaped entirely by platforms designed to exploit them, while the institution best positioned to offer an alternative chose to look away.

None of this is an argument for letting every edtech tool into the classroom unchallenged. Some platforms used in K-12 settings run on the same engagement mechanics as the consumer technology we are rightly concerned about, and poor digital habits exist in classrooms just as they exist everywhere else. But a minute counter does not solve either of those problems. It does not tell you whether a student is being exploited by an algorithm or doing the most careful thinking of their academic week. Choosing the right instrument matters more than setting the right limit.

What District Leaders Should Actually Do

If your board is asking you to develop a screen time policy, here is the framework I would bring to that conversation.

• Target the specific threat, not the general category. A policy that blocks YouTube, TikTok, and algorithmic social media platforms on district devices is addressing the actual problem. A policy that counts the minutes a student spends in Google Docs is not. Design your restrictions around the features and platforms that are engineered to exploit students, and protect the space for slow, deliberate, teacher-supervised use of productive tools.

• Fund professional development before you fund monitoring. If your budget process forces a choice between a device management and monitoring tool and a robust PD program centered on intentional technology use, invest in the PD. Every dollar you spend helping teachers model and redirect healthy technology habits will return more than every dollar you spend counting minutes. The research is clear on this point, even if the budget documents are not.

• Define your assessment exemptions in writing before your policy goes live. Identify every digital assessment tool in use across your district, map each one to whether it qualifies under your exemption language, and issue written guidance before implementation. Make sure that you are not hindering your ability to make data-informed decisions.

If your district is working through a screen time conversation, Balanced by Design was built for exactly this moment. It is a four-month cohort for district leadership teams, structured around assessing your current technology environment, aligning your policies to what the research supports, and building an implementation plan your staff can execute. This fall’s cohort has limited space.

Learn more at rootedk12.com/balancedbydesign

Buried in the milestones section, alongside financial literacy and FAFSA completion, is artificial intelligence literacy.

According to the report, stakeholders repeatedly emphasized AI literacy during public engagement, to the point where the council elevated it from a background theme into a formal recommendation. Governor Healey’s administration had already released AI literacy guidance for educators last year, so the policy groundwork was there.

Supporters call it overdue workforce preparation whereas others are raising legitimate questions: What exactly will districts be expected to teach? Who will teach it, and do they have the preparation and support to do it well? Does this mandate that students engage with AI tools? Every response to this announcement is raising something real, but the phrase “AI literacy” is carrying three distinct conversations at once.

Think about how we teach a teenager to drive. There’s understanding how the engine works. There’s learning the rules of the road and what makes driving dangerous. And then there’s actually putting your hands on the wheel. Nobody confuses those three things when it comes to a car, but we’ve somehow let them collapse into one phrase when it comes to AI.

Lane 1: The Engine

This is AI literacy as mechanics: what a large language model actually is, how it’s trained, why it predicts the next word instead of “thinking” in any meaningful sense, what a token is, why it hallucinates. Understanding the engine means a student can reason about AI outputs critically rather than treating them as authoritative conclusions from a machine that simply knows things.

This lane generates relatively little friction across stakeholder groups. Georgia and Mississippi have folded this kind of instruction into new computer science graduation requirements, phasing in over the next several years. Idaho enacted S.B. 1227, which mandates a statewide AI framework that includes literacy standards alongside data privacy and procurement requirements.

If Massachusetts defines the AI literacy milestone narrowly around this lane, the implementation conversation will be well received. Computer science teachers already have the vocabulary and frameworks, so the discussion is mostly about resources and capacity.

Lane 2. The Rules of the Road

This is AI literacy as civic and ethical awareness: recognizing bias in AI outputs, understanding what happens to your data, spotting AI-generated disinformation, knowing when a deepfake is trying to manipulate you. This lane made its way into federal policy as well, with the Department of Education’s supplemental priority explicitly naming the detection of AI-generated disinformation as a core skill worth supporting through federal grant programs.

PISA is adding AI literacy to its assessment battery for the first time in 2029. That means the world’s largest comparative measure of 15-year-olds’ skills will start grading the United States on how well students can navigate AI’s societal risks, not just its mechanics. Massachusetts, historically a strong performer on international assessments, has particular reason to take this lane seriously.

This lane tends to draw broad agreement across the ideological and political spectrums. Policymakers, parents, teachers, and district leaders alike generally want students who can identify a manipulated image or understand that a chatbot’s confident assertion isn’t the same as a verified fact. The disagreements here are mostly about emphasis and grade-level sequencing, not about whether to teach it at all.

Lane 3. Learning to Drive

This is where the sharpest questions live and will likely create the most discussion in the coming months. This is literacy as direct tool use: should a high schooler be permitted to draft an essay with AI assistance? Will districts need to procure additional AI tools for teachers and students? At what age will students start using generative AI, and how will this work with academic integrity policies?

These are not fringe concerns. Parents and researchers are actively discussing if the use of generative AI enhances or harms the learning process. Teachers asking how they’re supposed to assess student learning are not resisting change; they’re identifying a genuine instructional design problem. District leaders asking about equity are pointing to something real: not every district has the same access to premium tools, and mandating AI literacy without addressing the access gap risks encoding a new kind of disparity. This lane is the one that raises the most alarm from parents and community members, and one that, without guidance and guardrails, will pull the conversation away from the other two.

Massachusetts doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel. Oklahoma’s Responsible Technology in Schools Act requires districts to adopt written policies on approved and prohibited uses, prohibits AI from being the primary basis for grading or discipline decisions, and preserves a family’s right to opt their child out of student-facing AI tools without academic penalty. New York is debating a bill that would keep AI out of instructional settings entirely below ninth grade. Arizona is pushing schools to actively detect and prevent unauthorized AI use in coursework while simultaneously requiring guidelines for when such use is authorized. Three states with three completely different answers, but each is establishing guardrails around the question of student use of AI tools while also address AI literacy.

The Massachusetts recommendation is silent on which of these lanes it actually means, so that means that some will interpret this as a mandate to adopt student-facing AI tools. The council elevated AI literacy to a formal milestone because stakeholders said it mattered, but the harder work, which now falls to the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, the Department, and ultimately to districts, is defining what demonstrating AI literacy actually looks like. And it will need to grapple honestly with the third lane rather than leaving it for each district to figure out on its own.

Who Gets the Keys, and When?

The graduation council’s recommendation is now public and the debate that comes next will run for months, probably longer, and the most consequential version of that debate isn’t about the mechanics lane or the rules-of-the-road lane. It’s about this one: what does direct student engagement with AI tools look like under a state-mandated AI literacy milestone, and who answers that question?

That question generates divergent readings of the same document, and three broad camps are taking shape around it. Some districts, technology coordinators, and edtech advocates will interpret the AI literacy directive as a signal, maybe even an obligation, to move rapidly toward student-facing AI tool adoption. From this perspective, you cannot demonstrate AI literacy without using AI. You cannot learn to evaluate an output without generating one. You cannot develop critical judgment about a tool you’ve never touched. If the state says students must meet an AI literacy milestone to graduate, and AI literacy requires authentic practice with these tools, then the mandate is effectively a procurement directive. Expect this reading to generate real momentum, and real purchasing conversations, in the months ahead. I wouldn’t be surprised if superintendents have already received sales emails that advertise how a particular AI tool will help them implement the new AI literacy requirements.

The second camp reaches for the driver’s education model: we don’t hand a sixteen-year-old a set of car keys and wish them luck. We start with coursework, build foundational knowledge, introduce supervised practice, and only gradually extend independence as competence and judgment develop. We also set a minimum age, not because sixteen-year-olds are inherently more trustworthy than fifteen-year-olds, but because we made a collective decision that some threshold matters. Applied to AI, this camp argues for deliberate sequencing: age-appropriate introduction, teacher-guided practice, and a clear progression before students are working independently with these tools in high-stakes academic contexts.

The third camp is less comfortable with the keys at all, at least not yet. This isn’t a technophobic position; it’s a precautionary one. Ralph Nader’s 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed wasn’t about whether cars were useful or not - he argued the Corvair was hazardous by design. It was about whether we had done the work to make them safe before putting them on the road at scale. There are educators, researchers, and families who look at the current state of generative AI in schools and ask a similar question: do we actually know what the cognitive and developmental effects of deep AI integration look like for adolescents? Do we have the academic integrity frameworks, the data privacy protections, and the equity guardrails in place? And if not, shouldn’t we figure out what the seatbelts look like before we start putting kids and teenagers behind the wheel?

None of these three positions is unreasonable. All three are showing up in school board meetings, legislative hearings, and staff rooms across Massachusetts right now. And the graduation milestone recommendation, as written, doesn’t tell us which camp the Commonwealth is in. That ambiguity is not a flaw in the council’s work. Resolving it was never their job, but it is the work that comes next, and it will require the state, districts, and communities to have the honest, lane-specific conversations they’ve been avoiding by hiding behind a single phrase.

Interested in learning more?

Here are some organizations doing some great work in this area:

• Digital Promise - AI Literacy

• AI Literacy Framework

• Day of AI

• EdSafe AI Alliance

• Media Literacy Now

Which lane is generating the most productive tension in your district right now? Drop a comment or send me a private note.

Every cell phone bill includes a small surcharge that feeds into a fund called the Universal Service Fund (USF) that was established by Congress and is governed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). This is the foundation of the E-Rate program, a multi-billion dollar program for schools & libraries to be reimbursed for costs associated with Internet access. School districts and libraries can apply each year for funding and the program reimburses costs like ISP service, fiber lines, and internal connections (e.g. wireless access points in classrooms). E-Rate does not pay for laptops or edtech software - it only covers Internet services. Each district’s funding level is primarily determined by their free and reduced lunch rate, with higher-poverty schools receiving a reimbursement rate of up to 90%. To put that in perspective, for my district that meant millions of dollars every year to cover basic internet costs and network hardware. Simply put, E-Rate is the reason why over 99% of schools in the United States have Internet access today.

On June 4, the FCC circulated a notice of proposed rulemaking that hit K-12 IT leaders like a bomb. The official title is a mouthful, “Ensuring Children’s Safe Use of Screens and E-Rate-Funded Services” but the immediate reaction has been deep worry that this is actually another attempt to get rid of E-Rate. I get it. When the very first substantive question in a federal document asks whether the program’s goals have already been satisfied, you brace for the worst.

I want to make the opposite case.

I am not here to tell you every idea in the document is good. Several make me genuinely nervous, and I will name them. But if you read it the way it is actually built, the dominant theme is not demolition. It is stewardship. And the single scariest piece, screen time, is the strongest evidence I have seen that the FCC plans to keep this program alive for a long time.

“Have we met the mission?”

The document opens by noting that when E-Rate launched in 1996, schools had almost no connectivity. Today, over 99% of schools have high-speed broadband. Demand is also running well under the cap. For funding year 2026, the demand sits at around 70% of the program cap. So the Commission asks, plainly, whether the universal service goal in section 254 of the Communications Act has been accomplished, and whether the program should be narrowed or restructured as a result.

Has Congress’ directive in section 254(h) of the Communications Act been satisfied? Should the E-Rate program be limited or sunset to reflect today’s extensive connectivity rates? At what point should policymakers conclude that the program’s core objective has been achieved? We seek comment on whether Congress intended E-Rate to operate indefinitely, regardless of the extent to which schools and libraries have achieved universal connectivity.

Here is the logic trap in that question, and my co-host Josh nailed it: you do not stop giving the polio vaccine because polio went away. Polio went away because of the vaccine. Although given this administration's track record on vaccines, maybe that actually explains the E-Rate logic.

We need to respond to that question by asking what would realistically happen if the program went away. I do not think school internet access would crater back to 1996 levels, but the internet is now a core service for schools and the FCC knows that. Yank the E-Rate program and you have not saved money, you have just shifted the bill onto a local tax base. That cost does not disappear - it comes out of another line item in a district’s budget. The current administration has made a lot of decisions that shift responsibility and funding to the local level and that is exactly why the initial reaction is one of great concern. So when the comment window opens, I expect the overwhelming response to be the same thing: do not make any cuts to E-Rate.

I also anticipate that the response will re-ignite a discussion that the FCC doesn’t want, which is to expand the eligible services list. While demand for the E-Rate program is currently below the program’s capacity, E-Rate is currently running a $200M cyber security pilot, which received $3.7B in applications. Districts want to expand the list of eligible services to include cybersecurity services, and I anticipate the comment period will reiterate that need.

The screen time question.

Now the other part that has everyone wound up. The FCC is dragging the screen time debate directly into E-Rate. It asks whether the money we have poured into connectivity is helping or hurting kids. At its most aggressive point, the document asks whether the Commission should impose per-day limits on the number of hours children can use E-Rate-funded networks, and whether Head Start and pre-K should be pulled from eligibility because that is where the developmental risk is highest.

Mindful of the increased use of the Internet and connected devices by children in educational settings, and the concerns about the impact of screen time on children, the Commission seeks comment on ways it can affirm its commitment to ensuring E-Rate-funded networks are being used responsibly and consistently with the universal service principles set forth by Congress in section 254 of the Communications Act.

Let me be direct about where I land. I believe that decisions about instruction should be made by the people who actually know the student, the classroom, and the curriculum. Full stop. For me, instructional technology falls under that definition and therefore decisions should happen at the local level, not by the FCC. However, I recognize that technology use by children is increasingly becoming an issue of public health, which is why I would prefer for any federal attention to be handled by our elected representation through CIPA and COPPA.

I am wary of the direction of travel by the FCC with some of their proposed changes. Up to now, the deal has been simple: here is the money to provide the service, stay CIPA-compliant, and otherwise we are done. The FCC, for the first time, gets into telling you how you may use the service. Given that Chairman Carr has made no secret of wanting to be more involved in managing and monitoring content, that shift deserves a hard look.

But here is the reframe, and it is the thing I cannot stop thinking about.

E-Rate is the only forcing mechanism the federal government has over school technology. There is no federal screen time law and Congress is not about to pass one. So if you are the FCC and you want any lever at all on school technology policy, E-Rate is it. You do not bolt a brand-new regulatory lever onto a program you intend to demolish.

Read that way, injecting screen time into E-Rate is not the death knell. It is proof of life. The questions in this document are in tension with each other. You cannot simultaneously kill E-Rate and use E-Rate to shape screen time policy. Simply put, the sheer volume of screen time questions tells me which way the Commission is actually leaning.

On the CIPA piece, the FCC asks whether filtering should extend beyond district-owned devices to any device on the network. Districts generally agree that harmful content does not belong in a school regardless of who owns the hardware but the practicality of managing content on a personal device is difficult, to say the least. I generally agree that schools should filter for inappropriate content on all devices in school, but I worry about a heavy-handed approach to something that districts cannot fully manage. Will the proposed rule changes place schools in the hot seat for issues outside of their control? Does this mean schools will need to budget for additional management and security tools to stay in compliance?

The funding formula

The document also reopens the discount matrix. Should the National School Lunch Program still set discount levels? Should the urban and rural split be adjusted? Should the lowest-tier districts, your affluent suburban communities pulling the smallest discounts, be removed from the program entirely?

We seek comment on whether the use of the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) eligibility and urban/rural status in determining an applicant’s discount rate remains an effective method for calculating support and ensuring that we are satisfying the universal service principles established by Congress in section 254 of the Communications Act. Does this general approach allocate funds fairly, efficiently, and achieve the objective of helping low-income and rural schools, or does a disproportionate share of funding flow to large, well-resourced school districts with substantial local tax bases?

Building off the previous section, I don’t think the FCC will make any changes that would remove districts from the E-Rate program. The question about removing districts with the lowest funding and participation rates in the E-Rate program would imply the more affluent suburban communities. This is where reading the document as a single connected package, rather than a list of isolated threats, actually calms my nerves about funding cuts. You are not going to cut the wealthy suburban districts out of E-Rate while also connecting the program to screen time limits. They are the loudest voices demanding screen time conversations, and you do not hand someone a policy lever before cutting out the very community pushing for it.

I have a lot of gripes about how education funding is handled in this country, but E-Rate is the exception. Funding is tied to NSLP (aka free/reduced lunch rates) to ensure our students with the most need receive the most resources. There is recognition that rural districts have the most challenges with broadband infrastructure. There are systems to ensure fair and appropriate use of public funds. I do not see the need for major changes, but it’s not a bad idea to periodically revisit our education funding mechanisms and discuss ways to improve access. I welcome the opportunity to discuss the funding formula as long as it’s not a veiled attempt to cut the program.

The Further Notice

Here is the part of the document that got far less attention than screen time and, in my opinion, matters more for the day-to-day integrity of the program. The Further Notice does not just ask questions. It proposes specific changes. And this is where I lean toward support.

Consultants.

A huge number of districts use E-Rate consultants, so it surprised me to read these rules and realize how genuinely unregulated that role is. The Commission proposes to actually define what an E-Rate consultant is, register the individuals and not just the firms, require an annual certification and disclosure form, build a registration database, and require mandatory anti-fraud training. The point of registering individuals is simple and overdue: when someone behaves badly or hides a financial tie to a vendor, you can document who they are so they cannot just hop to a new firm and keep operating. This is not theoretical. The document cites a 2026 guilty plea from a consultant who took kickbacks from service providers, and a GAO report flagging exactly this oversight gap. More structure and regulation in this area can definitely benefit districts and safeguard public dollars. Plenty of districts have lived the story of a consultant who blew a deadline, put the district’s funding at risk, and then claimed zero financial responsibility.

Percentage-based consultant fees.

I had honestly not thought hard about this one until I read it, and now it seems obvious. If your consultant gets paid a percentage of whatever funding your application brings in, what exactly is their incentive? To inflate the funding request. That is a conflict of interest baked right into the fee structure, and prohibiting it protects both the district and the program.

The Kalamazoo loophole.

This one goes back to a 2002 decision that let a district keep a pre-existing contract and treat it as the winning “bid” during competitive bidding. What started as a reasonable exception has turned into a loophole to competitive bidding by allowing districts to sign a long-term deal with a provider before bidding, then use the exception to skate through with no real competition. The proposal would require all contracts to be signed after the allowable contract date. I can get behind that: competition works in the public’s favor, and these rules say so plainly.

Unbundling MIBS

Managed Internal Broadband Services (MIBS) let districts bundle hardware, software, licensing, and support into one recurring, E-Rate-eligible line. The FCC’s concern is that bundling hides what the underlying hardware actually costs, which makes it impossible to know if a district is being overcharged. Plenty of districts rely on the current MIBS structure, and if it changes, the cost shock will be real and the unwinding will take painful conversations. If this is you, read that section closely.

Service Provider Accountability

Another example of the FCC’s strengthening of district protections is the new June 30th deadline for service providers to file their form 473. E-Rate is a reimbursement program, so when a service provider misses its annual certification deadline, there’s a risk that the school district may not receive reimbursement for costs already incurred. Codifying a hard date for service providers to file their paperwork protects school districts and public dollars.

Taken in totality, a lot of the proposed changes are trying to safeguard public dollars and protect districts from vendors and consultants exerting undue influence over bids and sole-source situations. The document asks whether the scope of eligible services has been shaped by vendor interests rather than the educational purpose that Congress intended. From where I sit, that is a fair question to ask. Those dynamics also take money out of the program that could allow the FCC to expand the eligible services list, too.

In Closing

The Supreme Court just upheld the constitutionality of the Universal Service Fund, the very mechanism that funds E-Rate, in FCC v. Consumers’ Research in June 2025. We litigated whether this program should exist, and the answer came back yes. Now, barely a year later, the FCC should not be asking if it’s time to get rid of the very program they fought to protect in front of the Supreme Court less than a year ago.

If you are going to reevaluate a program a court just blessed, we should be using this as an opportunity to strengthen the program. Expand the Eligible Services List to include cybersecurity. Strengthen the guardrails against fraud. Consider adding eligible services that allow districts to better adhere to CIPA. Those are the changes the field is begging for - we do not need our funding threatened or blamed for screen time.

So where do I fall on everything? I don’t believe the FCC intends to dismantle the E-Rate program, but I worry this framing is being used as a distraction to push a different agenda. After all, why schedule a public comment period when the majority of K-12 practitioners are away on summer break? While I am genuinely uneasy about the FCC using E-Rate to address screen time, there are proposed changes that I can support. If you strip away the initial political framing, it's clear the Commission is also trying to be a careful steward of public funds, protecting districts from those who would exploit the program.

What district leaders should do right now

• Do not panic, but do not tune out. This is a circulation draft on the agenda for the FCC’s June 25 open meeting. It is not law, and nothing here is final. If it is adopted, it opens a formal comment period, roughly 30 days for comments and 60 for reply comments after it hits the Federal Register. That window is your leverage.

• Comment on specific clauses. This is the part that matters most. Do not vote thumbs up or thumbs down on a 70-page document. Pick the provisions that hit your district and respond to those. Tell the Commission what happens to your budget if special construction or MIBS eligibility goes away. Tell them why a federal screen time cap is unworkable in your classrooms. Specific feedback from practitioners moves rulemaking. Generic outrage does not.

• Loop in the people who do this for a living. Reach out to your state E-Rate coordinator, your CoSN contacts, and the consortia and advocacy groups you already coordinate with on legislative items. They know how Washington politics operate and can elevate your voice to the right people.

What do you think? Are you reading this as the beginning of the end for E-Rate, or as a program getting a long-overdue tune-up? Drop a comment or send me a note. And if you only do one thing after reading this, file a comment when the window opens.

The guys discuss what services could be removed from E‑Rate eligibility, the FCC's questions about screen time, CIPA filtering expectations, and how the Commission is reexamining the program's original connectivity goals. They also dig into the changes to consultant definitions and fee structures, managed internal broadband services (MIBS), and potential unbundling of hardware vs. service costs, and more.

Carr Opens E-Rate Program Review to Ensure it Meets Congress's Vision 

CoSN Statement

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Meter CyberNut CDWG Fortinet ClassLink NTP Extreme Networks Lightspeed Systems SMC Electric SMC Electric Testimony   CDWG - K12 Solutions & Services Overview Video: https://webobjects2.cdw.com/is/content/CDW/cdw/on-domain-cdw/videos/ssi/k12/mkt94999-k12-ssi-video-full-with-captions.mp4   CDWG - Strengthening K12 Cybersecurity: https://webobjects2.cdw.com/is/content/CDW/cdw/on-domain-cdw/videos/ssi/k12-cybersecurity/mkt94971-k12-cybersecurity-ssi-full-video-with-captions.mp4 ————

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Disclaimer: The views and work done by Josh, Chris, and Mark are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions or positions of sponsors or any respective employers or organizations associated with the guys. K12 Tech Talk itself does not endorse or validate the ideas, views, or statements expressed by Josh, Chris, and Mark's individual views and opinions are not representative of K12 Tech Talk. Furthermore, any references or mention of products, services, organizations, or individuals on K12 Tech Talk should not be considered as endorsements related to any employer or organization associated with the guys.

Chris and Mark cover the rapid early success of Apple’s new MacBook Neo, including Kansas City Public Schools’ plan to replace roughly 30,000 Windows PCs and Chromebooks after a 4,500‑unit proof of concept.

Elizabethtown Area School District’s cell phone and smartwatch ban (and the community reaction to program names like “Cellcatraz” versus “Device Den”) is discussed. The guys highlight new guidance from the National Council of Teachers of English on using AI in ELA classrooms, centered on a practical stoplight model (red, yellow, green) that helps teachers define AI use. A major segment revisits last week’s episode about showing movies in class. Finally, Chris interviews Chantell Manahan, Director of Technology at MSD of Steuben County, to discuss her district’s experience with SysCloud.

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SysCloud Meter Fortinet Managed Methods NetWatch   Today’s K-12 schools are balancing more than ever, student safety, campus communication, cybersecurity, and growing technology demands. For more than 20 years, NetWatch has partnered with schools to help create safer and smarter learning environments through integrated technology and security solutions. From AI-powered video surveillance and access control to emergency communications and IP paging systems, structured cabling, and managed IT services, our team helps keep your
campuses SAFE, SECURE, and CONNECTED. As an Axis Communications Gold Solution Partner, NetWatch delivers industry-leading security technology backed by trusted expertise and long-term support for your district. Whether you’re planning infrastructure upgrades, improving campus security, or preparing for future technology needs, NetWatch is here to help. Ready to strengthen your campus technology and security strategy? Visit NetWatchIP.com and connect with our team today. NetWatch, Protect and Connect with Confidence. ————

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For district and school administrators, the past few years have felt like playing whack-a-mole with a new mallet every season. Ransomware turned K-12 into one of the most-targeted sectors in the country. Student data privacy became a compliance maze, with a thickening patchwork of state laws raising the stakes on every vendor agreement. COVID was barely in the rear view mirror when generative AI landed in students’ hands and districts had to form a position on a technology they were still trying to understand. And now all of that has culminated in the screen time debate and parents at board meetings asking a fair and important question: Is all this technology helping or hurting our kids?

Each of these shows up looking like its own emergency, with its own headlines, its own experts, and its own pressure to act right now. Every one of these issues (cyber, privacy, AI, screen time) is really the same question wearing different clothes: Is this technology being used intentionally, and can we explain why? A district that can answer that question is a district that can defend its security posture, its privacy practices, its AI guidance, and its screen time decisions.

I’m not writing to defend technology in schools, and I’m not writing to ban it. I want to make the case that the solution is not necessarily a state or federal policy; it’s district strategy. These aren’t separate crises requiring separate responses. They’re symptoms of the same underlying gap: districts that accumulated technology faster than they built the capacity to evaluate it. I’ve spent the last few years working with districts on exactly this challenge and the pattern is consistent. Before getting to what the path forward looks like, here’s what I keep seeing on the ground:

1. The Stack Grew Faster Than the Strategy

Ask a director of technology in almost any district how many active platforms they’re running, then ask them how many are actually used consistently by more than half of their teachers. The gap between those two numbers is where the problem lives.

It didn’t happen because anyone made a bad decision. It happened because districts said yes, one tool at a time, to every compelling demo and every grant-funded pilot. There was also that worldwide pandemic that necessitated the rapid adoption of remote learning tools. Each individual adoption made sense in the moment, but the accumulated result is a sprawling, overlapping, ecosystem of apps.

Think about what that ecosystem actually costs. There’s the licensing fees, the professional development time, the time to negotiate security agreements, the time for the IT Department to support & maintain each platform, and the growing risk of vendor cyber attacks. Every platform is a vendor agreement, a data sharing arrangement, a new potential failure point, and a new set of records in a growing pile of state privacy laws.

More tools don’t necessarily mean more learning. They mean more exposure, more complexity, and more noise.

2. The System Is Not a System.

Here’s the part that rarely gets said out loud. We often evaluate the effectiveness of edtech by looking at usage reports or efficacy studies, but it’s the wrong unit of analysis. A single app might work beautifully in one third-grade classroom and be the wrong fit for the room next door. A tool that transforms how one student processes information might do nothing for another. That’s not a failure of the app or the district; that’s just how learning works. It’s personal, contextual, and deeply tied to the relationships and environment surrounding it.

The job of district leadership isn’t to find the one app that works for everyone. It’s to build and protect learning environments where teachers have the flexibility to meet students where they are, and where technology serves that goal rather than driving it. The question was never Is this platform effective? The question should be Is our learning environment effective, and do our teachers and students have the appropriate tools and strategies to support the learning process?

What’s missing in most districts is the infrastructure to answer that bigger question. Administrators were handed devices, platforms, and rollout timelines, but rarely a rubric for observing how technology holistically functions within instruction. The capacity to evaluate was never built alongside the capacity to deploy. Closing that gap requires helping leadership teams build a shared, community-grounded picture of their learning environments and make technology decisions from that foundation outward — and that’s exactly what this work is about.

3. The Security and Privacy Argument

The screen time conversation almost always stays on the surface: too much time, too many distractions, not enough balance. But the tools generating that screen time don’t disappear when the device closes. Every platform a district runs is also a data pipeline, and the screen time debate is incomplete if it never asks where that data goes. K-12 has become one of the most-targeted sectors for cyberattacks because schools hold enormous amounts of sensitive data and have historically had thin defenses. Every platform you sign up for is another login, another potential point of failure, another agreement your team has to monitor. Keeping students offline doesn’t mean that their data is too.

This is where the quality-over-quantity argument stops being purely pedagogical and becomes a matter of risk management. A sprawling collection of lightly used platforms isn’t just diluting instructional focus. It’s expanding your attack surface and your compliance burden at the same time.

Consolidating around fewer, better-used, well-vetted tools doesn’t only sharpen teaching, it shrinks the number of doors a bad actor can try. You cannot have an honest conversation about what technology belongs in your classrooms without also asking what each tool costs you in privacy and security risk. Those questions belong on the same table.

Policy Won’t Fix This. Alignment Will.

When pressure mounts, there’s a strong temptation to look towards a policy. This is where I’ll admit that I’m a bit jaded from my experience. I understand the importance and value of education policy, but it’s rare that policies result in tangible changes in the classroom. To actually change the classroom experience, change needs to come from teachers who understand the why behind a decision, not from a policy they were never consulted on. Real change comes through professional learning. If a district later decides to formalize their approach into board policy, that’s a good thing - but policy should be the consequence of alignment and not a substitute for it.

The harder, more important work is building a shared picture of what technology is actually doing in your schools, agreeing on what you want it to do, and then cutting what doesn’t serve that vision. That takes more than a policy. It takes a process.

Balanced by Design

Everything in this piece — the bloated tool stacks, the missing infrastructure for evaluation, the security exposure, the limits of policy without alignment — is what led me to build Balanced by Design. I kept seeing the same pattern across districts: smart people, real urgency, and no shared process for doing the work.

So I built one.

Balanced by Design is a structured, four-month engagement built to help districts do exactly that work: move from reactive screen time debates to a proactive, evidence-based, community-grounded approach. It runs in small cohorts of districts working through the same three phases at the same time, so you get peer learning alongside district-specific deliverables.

Three phases, each ending in a named deliverable you present to your own leadership before moving on:

• Assess (Weeks 1-5). Learn how to assess technology use in classrooms and begin to understand how technology is used in the learning process. We’ll arm your instructional leadership with the framework to understand how technology is used, not just how much.

• Align (Weeks 6-10). Facilitated visioning with guest facilitators and speakers on adolescent mental health, cybersecurity, and data privacy. You walk out with a Balanced Technology Vision, with benchmarks for every grade band from K-2 through 9-12.

• Act (Weeks 11-16). Three coordinated plans built in parallel, covering instructional practice, guidance, and procurement. You walk out with an Action Plan your team keeps and uses long after the program ends.

It’s delivered virtually to keep it affordable, with peer districts so everyone gets real attention. Districts should plan on sending an executive sponsor, a curriculum and instruction leader, and a technology leader. You don’t need an existing policy to join; you just need leadership ready to have an honest conversation.

Applications are open now for the inaugural cohort. If your district is ready to lead this conversation, here’s how you can learn more:

• Learn: Visit rootedk12.com/balancedbydesign for full program details.

• Ask: Reach out to info@rootedk12.com and tell me about your district’s context and what you’re hoping to tackle.

• Apply: We’re accepting the first cohorts to start this fall and districts can submit your interest here.

The main topic is on MOVIES! "Can I watch that movie in my classroom?" The guys discuss copyright, fair use, and the difference between streaming subscriptions and licensed educational services.

Oh, and Josh loves cookies.

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SysCloud Meter Fortinet Managed Methods Lightspeed Twotrees NTP   As Tech Directors, we all know that buying the hardware is the easy part. Rolling it out across a district and dealing with the anxiety of "what-if's"? That’s the real headache. That’s where Twotrees Technologies comes in. For over 40 years, they’ve been purpose-built to support school districts, which means they actually get it. They aren’t just dropping off boxes and disappearing. Twotrees brings deep E-Rate expertise, certified engineers, and a sales team that stands by you from the initial design to deployment and ongoing support. Plus, they can bring transparent, contract-backed pricing to the table so you can get the board approvals you need without the stress. Stop wrestling with resellers who don't understand K-12. Partner with Twotrees and let them do the heavy lifting. Visit twotrees.com to learn more. ————

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Disclaimer: The views and work done by Josh, Chris, and Mark are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions or positions of sponsors or any respective employers or organizations associated with the guys. K12 Tech Talk itself does not endorse or validate the ideas, views, or statements expressed by Josh, Chris, and Mark's individual views and opinions are not representative of K12 Tech Talk. Furthermore, any references or mention of products, services, organizations, or individuals on K12 Tech Talk should not be considered as endorsements related to any employer or organization associated with the guys.

The guys dive into several stories affecting schools - cybercriminal deep‑fake sextortion attacks using student photos from public sites; a public GitHub repository that exposed highly privileged CISA credentials; and the ongoing fallout from the Instructure Canvas breach.

The main topic explores why recent commencement speakers have been booed when addressing AI. Josh, Chris, and Mark unpack students’ resentment, perceived academic hypocrisy (banning AI in coursework while urging graduates to use it in the workforce), fear over job displacement, and the pedagogical shifts already appearing in syllabi and assessment methods.

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SysCloud Meter Fortinet Incident IQ VIZOR Lightspeed Provision Data Solutions ————

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Unofficial demo of AluminumOS: https://youtu.be/dXmFIfv_tIA?si=Baw0OInBqJf-IkDD

The largest segment is a deep dive into the Canvas/Instructure incident with cybersecurity expert Michael Klein. He walks through the timeline (initial unauthorized activity detected April 29; exfiltration via cross‑site scripting of a free‑for‑teachers account; a later attack that posted extortion notes to some users), the involvement of CrowdStrike, the public claims by the ShinyHunters group, and Instructure’s statement about an agreement with the actor. The conversation covers the technical nature of the attack, impacts on confidentiality, integrity and availability (including disruptions to finals/registrar functions), the downstream consequences for integrations with SIS and other edtech systems, and why many institutions remain cautious to reconnect APIs.

Michael and the hosts discuss practical guidance and explore policy implications.

Join us July 6th-10th, 2026 – GAMEIS Conference in Savannah, GA

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SysCloud Meter Fortinet Incident IQ ClassLink NTP ————

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The episode also examines a new bill aimed at restricting AI companion chatbots for minors and debates age verification and safety concerns. Finally, the guys review a National Bureau of Economic Research study on lockable cell phone pouches, weighing the limited academic impacts found after one year against observed cultural benefits in schools.

Finally, Chris interviews Dave Barclay, Director of Product with Deledao!

https://www.k12dive.com/news/proposal-to-ban-ai-companions-for-minors-advances-in-senate/819239/

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Deledao

PowerGistics:

How K-12 Charging Models Impact Chromebook Sustainability

Textbooks Didn’t have Cables

Bring Chromebooks Back to the Classroom, but NOT Carts!

One-Person Tech Department Success Story

SysCloud Meter Fortinet VIZOR Lightspeed Extreme Networks Managed Methods ————

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For the main topic, the guys talk about "secure email." Districts are being asked to send more sensitive information outside the network - to parents, agencies, vendors - but there's no shared standard for what "secure email" even means in K12. TLS encryption in transit isn't the same as end-to-end encryption. A password-protected PDF isn't a secure channel. And most staff don't know the difference.

————

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PowerGistics:

How K-12 Charging Models Impact Chromebook Sustainability

Textbooks Didn’t have Cables

Bring Chromebooks Back to the Classroom, but NOT Carts!

One-Person Tech Department Success Story

SysCloud Fortinet Extreme Networks ————

Join the K12TechPro Community (exclusively for K12 Tech professionals)

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Disclaimer: The views and work done by Josh, Chris, and Mark are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions or positions of sponsors or any respective employers or organizations associated with the guys. K12 Tech Talk itself does not endorse or validate the ideas, views, or statements expressed by Josh, Chris, and Mark's individual views and opinions are not representative of K12 Tech Talk. Furthermore, any references or mention of products, services, organizations, or individuals on K12 Tech Talk should not be considered as endorsements related to any employer or organization associated with the guys.

On the screen time front, the hosts review LAUSD’s draft approach that emphasizes guidelines over hard time caps, reductions in K–1 screen use, changes to device programs for grades 2–5, and limits on student-led YouTube use.

The episode closes with a deep dive into K-12 IT careers: why pay and titles vary widely, how to grow from help desk roles to director or CTO positions, and practical tips - gain hands-on experience, earn relevant certifications, build communication skills and networks, be patient, and be intentional about career moves.

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How K-12 Charging Models Impact Chromebook Sustainability

Textbooks Didn’t have Cables

Bring Chromebooks Back to the Classroom, but NOT Carts!

One-Person Tech Department Success Story

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Earl Franks, NAESP

Jean-Claude Brizard, Digital Promise Global

CTL (Jason and Michelle)

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School leadership, funding concerns, AI, building coordinated systems, sustainable device lifecycle, cybersecurity, data privacy, screen time policies, and more are discussed!

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Textbooks Didn’t have Cables

Bring Chromebooks Back to the Classroom, but NOT Carts!

One-Person Tech Department Success Story

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They cover recent news items that affect K12 cybersecurity: proposed federal budget cuts that shift CISA and school safety responsibilities to states, the growth of non-classroom education jobs including IT roles, and the industry response to potentially dangerous AI models.

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How K-12 Charging Models Impact Chromebook Sustainability

Textbooks Didn’t have Cables

Bring Chromebooks Back to the Classroom, but NOT Carts!

One-Person Tech Department Success Story

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The episode also covers recent news - the Navigate360 tip‑line breach, the White House AI legislative recommendations related to students, the Google/Meta social media liability case, and Waymo’s repeated failures to stop for school buses in Texas.

Finally, Chris interviews Brian Edwards from Swank. They discuss Swank's movie licensing and classroom streaming solution.

Judge grabs internet's attention after confrontation with IT technician 

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Nine minutes later, at 2:20 PM, Infinite Campus’s security systems began firing alerts. At the same time, employees at the company's Minnesota headquarters started receiving phone calls from the attacker posing as IT. According to Charlie Kratch, founder and CEO of Infinite Campus, every employee who received a call reported the same thing: the person on the other end sounded like a real American, like someone from IT.

At 2:38 PM, one of those calls reached a remote employee who did not work on-site. The employee followed the caller’s instructions and logged into the imposter domain.

At 2:44 PM, six minutes later, the unauthorized actor accessed the employee’s Salesforce account. The imposter site had captured not just the employee’s credentials but also their MFA session token, bypassing multi-factor authentication entirely. This employee had MFA enabled but not all MFA methods offer the same level of protection and unfortunately the threat actor was prepared.

The attacker moved fast and immediately began running reports inside Salesforce: customer lists, support ticket data, contact information. They knew exactly what they were after, exactly what reports to run, and exactly how to export the data. By 2:48 PM, just four minutes after gaining access, the attacker had already pulled the data they wanted.

Meanwhile, Infinite Campus’s security team was working the problem. They blocked the imposter domain, began auditing every Salesforce account and every access log. By 3:10 PM, they had identified the compromised account. By 3:16 PM, they had shut off the employee’s access to everything.

From the first phishing call to full containment: 38 minutes.

The threat actor was a group known as “Shiny Hunters,” well documented by the FBI for conducting hundreds of Salesforce-targeted attacks across industries and ties to Scattered Spider and LAPSUS$. Shiny Hunters targets Salesforce customers but doesn't exploit a vulnerability in Salesforce's platform; they specialize in social engineering at scale.

We know all of this because Charlie Kratch agreed to come on the K12 Tech Talk Podcast this week and walk through the incident in real time. Let me say that again: the CEO of a company in the middle of an active cybersecurity event got on a podcast to detail the incident and answer questions. That deserves recognition, and I want to give credit where credit is due.

What They Got (and What They Didn’t)

Let me start with what remains true. The attack targeted Infinite Campus’s Salesforce instance, not the Infinite Campus student information system. There is no connection between Salesforce and the district-facing campus database. The student data, the grades, the demographics, the attendance records stored in the SIS remained untouched. ShinyHunters released 1.2 gigabytes of data on their website and here’s what it includes:

1. A directory of nearly 148,000 school district employees. Names, email addresses, titles, phone numbers. This is the contact data for the people who interact (or could interact) with Infinite Campus across the country, and it could easily be weaponized for mass phishing campaigns by any threat actor who downloads it. My name and contact information is in this file even though I have never used Infinite Campus or been a customer. But my contact information is sitting on the dark web because at some point it made its way into Infinite Campus’s Salesforce CRM.

2. Internal company documents. Sales decks, status meeting notes from district and state implementations, and other operational files that were never meant to be public, although worthless to anybody other than maybe a competitor.

3. A large file of support tickets from district personnel. These don’t appear to be the full ticket database and are likely just the tickets that were submitted directly to Infinite Campus or escalated from their implementation partners between 2013 and March of 2026. The data includes all fields for each ticket and within some of those ticket descriptions there are student names and student data.

Despite Charlie’s assertion that student data is scrubbed from support tickets, the released data shows otherwise.

Credit Where It’s Due, Correction Where It’s Needed

I want to hold two things at the same time here, because I think both are true.

First, Infinite Campus deserves credit for their communication. Charlie Kratch notified districts on Sunday and got on our podcast Thursday, the day the attackers released the stolen data on the dark web. While third-party forensic reviewers were still analyzing the released files, Charlie walked us through the timeline, the attack vector, and the response. That is not how most vendors handle a breach. The standard playbook is to lawyer up, issue a vague statement, and then go quiet and hope it blows over. Charlie did the opposite.

Infinite Campus’s internal response also deserves recognition. They shut down the entire incident within an hour of the first attack, likely preventing lateral movement and further data exfiltration. At a time when we’re used to hearing stories of attackers living within systems for weeks or months, this attack was over in 38 minutes. They refused to negotiate with the attacker, despite knowing that Shiny Hunters is consistent with their timelines and threats to post stolen data.

Second, some of Charlie’s characterizations during our interview don’t hold up against the released data.

Charlie told us that Infinite Campus staff have a standard operating procedure for deleting student names when they appear in support tickets. Based on what ShinyHunters released, that does not appear to be true (or at least consistently applied). There are tickets in the released data that contain student names and student information in the description fields in plain view.

Charlie also characterized this as “directory level” data. That’s partially accurate in the narrow sense that most of the student names appearing in tickets don’t go much further than a name.

How does FERPA define “Directory Level” information?

In the world of education data, the term “directory-level” is not referring to publicly-available staff directories on district websites. In this sense, we’re talking about a term from the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) that allows districts to publicly post some student data for things like sports rosters or academic recognitions. This is your news article highlighting your school’s honor roll or the highlights from last night’s football game.

But there are two problems with that framing. First, Infinite Campus has no way of knowing whether the students named in those tickets have opted out of directory information sharing by their parents. Districts make those determinations locally, and a student whose family has opted out of directory sharing has a FERPA-protected expectation that their name won’t show up on the web. Second, FERPA’s definition of directory information permits disclosure under specific, controlled conditions. Unauthorized posting on a threat actor’s website is not one of them.

To be clear: in the grand scheme of student data breaches, this is not anywhere near the level of the PowerSchool attack or other large-scale incidents we’ve seen in K-12. The data that was exposed is limited in scope, but Infinite Campus needs to continue communicating the specific impact to districts, and the characterization of this data as routine directory information understates what is actually sitting in the released files.

What can districts take away from this?

We spend enormous energy fortifying the front door with our student information systems, our assessment platforms, and our critical applications. And we should. Those are the crown jewels, and every data governance framework, every vendor agreement and board policy is built around protecting them.

But while we’re reinforcing the front door, there’s a back door to the same house that we barely think about. The ticketing systems. The CRM tools. The asset management platforms. The HR workflow apps. These systems don’t hold student records by design but they inevitably collect sensitive information through everyday use. Teacher submits a support ticket and includes a student’s name and behavior concern. An HR department processes a W-2 update through a workflow tool. A technician documents a device investigation with details about a specific student. Sensitive information about your infrastructure or the people in your district show up in ticket after ticket.

The Infinite Campus breach didn’t come through the front door. The attacker came through the back door, and what they found inside was still part of the same house.

The Coincidence That Wasn’t

Just one week before the Infinite Campus interview, we recorded an episode of K12 Tech Talk with RT Collins, the CEO of Incident IQ, about data governance in ticketing systems. RT made a point that now feels almost prophetic: when you ask IT leaders to identify their systems with the most sensitive data, most of them would skip right over their service desk. But ticketing systems are full of information that could be damaging if compromised. Student names, configuration details, HR records, behavioral notes. The Infinite Campus breach proved him right before the episode even aired.

This is the distinction I want to make: the scope of your data protection strategy should not be limited to student data. Most vendor agreements and breach notification protocols are built around FERPA and student PII, and that makes sense as a starting point. But as this incident illustrates, a breach of a vendor’s non-student-facing system can still expose sensitive information about your district: staff contact information, infrastructure details, and support conversations that may reference students, employees, or operational vulnerabilities.

You don’t need new policies; you just need to widen the lens on the ones you already have. Make sure your vendor agreements cover any data held about your district, regardless of the system it lives in. When you conduct risk assessments, don’t stop at the SIS and the LMS. Ask about the ticketing system. Ask about the CRM. Ask about the ancillary tools your vendors use to manage your relationship.

Lock the back door with the same care you lock the front.

What Comes Next?

Coincidentally, I’ll be continuing this conversation on April 21st in a webinar with K12 SIX and Sriram Seshadri, the Head of Security at Clever. The session is called “Beyond the Breach: Setting a New Security Standard for Vendor Partnerships” and we’ll dig into the shared responsibility model for district-vendor security relationships. We won’t be explicitly discussing the Infinite Campus incident but the lessons remain the same.

You can register here: https://www.k12six.org/k12six-webinars/clever421

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That last part isn’t a metaphor. Waymo is literally paying DoorDash drivers to close car doors that passengers leave open. When a rider exits and doesn’t shut the door all the way, the car becomes paralyzed in the road. It can’t move. So Waymo pings a nearby DoorDash worker, who drives over and closes the door for a quick buck. A $126 billion company backed by Google has completed over 20 million fully autonomous trips but is stymied by an open car door.

The technology can navigate six-lane intersections but it cannot account for a basic, unpredictable human behavior. Naturally, someone in San Francisco asked me when Waymo would perform in Boston. My immediate response? Good luck.

It’s Not the Roads. It’s the Culture.

When people think about autonomous vehicles in Boston, they assume the challenge is infrastructure: the narrow streets, occasional cobblestones and dreaded rotaries. Sure, those are factors but Waymo has already navigated these obstacles in other cities. The engineering problems of Boston’s streets are solvable. The real challenge is the culture.

Boston drivers operate on an entirely different set of unwritten rules than drivers in San Francisco or Phoenix. The “Boston Left” is a rule of the road. Jaywalking is just called “crossing the street”. Instead of turn signals, we use the middle finger. These behaviors aren’t bugs in the transportation system; they are the system. Every driver and pedestrian in Boston understands the local code, even if they’ve never articulated it.

This is what makes Boston different from Phoenix, Austin, and San Francisco. The technology isn’t the variable; the culture is.

Sound familiar?

Same Tool + Different Classrooms = Different Results.

Walk into two classrooms in the same school and you’ll probably find the same curriculum, same Chromebooks, and same learning management system but with very different environments. One room could be noisy, with students jumping between desks and collaborating with peers on their latest draft. Down the hall, a classroom could be completely silent as students work independently. This isn’t a judgement of quality; it’s the classroom culture and is a core part of the educational experience. This is the part of the equation that edtech has never solved because it’s not a technical variable; it’s a human one.

Recently, there has been a wave of researchers, influencers, and journalists who are pointing to research that says edtech is mostly useless, even harmful. The research isn't wrong, but it's not complete either. What it fails to measure is fidelity of use, teacher experience, professional development, and (most importantly) classroom culture. I saw this first-hand when schools would purchase edtech products at the end of the year with 'leftover budget' and no implementation plan. The critics of edtech and the purchasers of edtech are making the same mistake: ignoring the culture that determines whether a tool succeeds or fails.

EdTech Never Solved the Culture Problem. COVID Proved It.

We already ran this experiment at scale, and the results are in.

When COVID hit, we didn’t have the luxury of a slow roll-out. We essentially tossed a fleet of automated cars onto every street in America and told everyone to figure it out. Millions of students were handed devices, pointed toward platforms, and told to learn. Teachers were handed tools they’d never used and told to teach. The technical layer was deployed almost overnight. This is by no means a criticism; it was necessary. Unfortunately, we knew from the beginning that the results were going to be inconsistent.

Some classrooms thrived during the early days of remote learning. Not because those teachers had better technology or faster internet (though those things mattered), but because they had already built strong relationships with their students. They knew how to read the room and could translate that through a screen. They had established norms and routines that could bend without breaking. The culture they’d created was resilient enough to survive the transition, because the teacher had built something that didn’t depend on the physical space alone.

But the following September was exponentially more challenging because teachers had to meet students and develop their cultures through a screen. The return to virtual school in the fall of 2020 was difficult, to say the least. Teachers were establishing their classroom culture through a screen (oftentimes with cameras turned off) and could not build personal connections with the same human touch. The lesson should have been clear: technology does not create the conditions for learning. Teachers do. And when we deploy technology without the ability to cultivate the culture beforehand, we get exactly what Waymo gets when it drops an autonomous vehicle into an unfamiliar city: a tool struggling to understand its culture.

AI Won’t Change How We Learn. Teachers Will.

This is the part that's hard to say, because the AI moment feels genuinely different. The tools are more powerful and the capabilities are more impressive, but the fundamental dynamic hasn't changed.

Two decades of edtech adoption have shown us this over and over. A great teacher is still a great teacher without technology. A teacher who hasn't yet built that culture is still going to struggle, even with the best edtech tools on the market. The tools that failed were always the ones that were dropped into a classroom and expected to assimilate. AI is no different.

Large language models, AI-powered edtech, and personalized learning platforms don't set classroom norms. They don't build trust. They don't know when a student needs a private redirect instead of a public one, or that a slowly-raised hand means something different coming from a student who typically raises their hand first. They don't create the conditions under which students are willing to struggle, take risks, and learn from failure. Teachers do that. And the classrooms where AI will thrive are the ones where teachers have already done that work and can identify the right cultural fit for the technology.

The Question Is Whether We’ve Learned Our Lesson

So here we are, at the start of another wave. AI is arriving in classrooms faster than most districts can write a policy about it. And the conversation, predictably, is dominated by the technology: Which tools should we adopt? How do we prevent cheating? What does an AI-acceptable-use policy look like?

Those are fine questions. But they’re the wrong starting point. The right starting point is the teacher.

Because if we’ve learned anything from the last twenty years of edtech, and especially from the forced experiment of COVID, it’s this: the same tool, the same curriculum, and the same strategy will produce different results in different classrooms. The difference is never the technology; it’s the culture that each teacher creates.

If we enter the age of AI with our focus on the tools, we will repeat the same cycle. We’ll deploy a tool, train teachers on the buttons and then we’ll wonder why the outcomes are inconsistent. And then we’ll blame the tech, or the students, or the budget, when the answer was always the same: we under-invested in the people who actually make classrooms work.

Here’s what it looks like to do this differently:

Put teacher development ahead of tool deployment. Before asking “Which AI tool should we adopt?”, ask “Are our teachers equipped to create the kind of classroom culture where an AI tool can be productive?” The culture has to come first, and that means investing in teachers with both professional development and time.

Give teachers authority over their own classrooms. Waymo doesn’t assume Phoenix norms will work in Boston. We shouldn’t assume that a district-mandated tool will work the same way in every classroom. Teachers are the ones who understand the culture of their room. Give them the autonomy to adapt, modify, or decline tools that don’t fit. Top-down deployment without teacher judgment is just another version of ignoring culture.

The Road Ahead

Waymo will eventually figure out Boston. The engineers will study the “Boston left”, learn that pedestrians are unpredictable, and understand that blinkers are optional.

AI will eventually become a meaningful part of classroom instruction too, but not because the tools got better. Because the teachers got the support, the time, and the trust they needed to build classroom cultures where those tools could actually work. The question is whether we’ve finally learned that or whether we’re about to make the same mistake with just a shinier set of tools.

What are your thoughts? Is AI in Edtech heading down the same path or is there still an opportunity to course-correct?

The conversation also explores the controversial use of AI chatbots for mental‑health support. Josh, Chris, and Mark share personal experiences and the challenges of balancing safety and usefulness.

The main segment summarizes four major federal proposals affecting student safety and tech: Sammy’s Law (third‑party child safety monitoring), COPPA updates raising the age protections and ad limits, the App Store Accountability Act (age verification and parental consent), and the broad but divisive Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act. 

Articles discussed this episode:
Securey shows how students are using AI

Should teens be confiding in AI for mental health?

Clever’s 2026 Cyber Secure Report

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Let’s face it; you’ve probably seen plenty of server rooms that keep you up at night. From messy, tangled cabling and untraceable connections to improperly installed equipment and poor ventilation, it can truly be the thing of nightmares. A site assessment conducted by a qualified Eaton expert allows education customers to help with your own server refresh to gain a comprehensive understanding of their operations and make informed decisions to optimize performance, increase reliability and enhance safety. See how Eaton can help make your server room more efficient with their server room refresh before and after and with insights provided by Eaton site assessments, schools can unlock their full potential and create life-long learners. Request a free site assessment here.

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