Technology Report 2021-22

The Beaverton School District has redundancy at the data center level, with 2 locations serving district network, telecommunications and system access needs and with either location able to assume full control of the district and continue operations in the event of an outage.  

The IT network engineering team recently completed a core router replacement project.  The district has multiple core routers at each data center to provide network connectivity and the existing core routers were approaching 10 years in age.  They were no longer capable to meet increased network requirements and were approaching end of life.  Working over a period of many months, the networking team completed the transition to the new core routers without any impact to the school or work day.  In addition to increased security and management features, the new core routers are capable of supporting district networking needs for many years into the future to maximize our investment in this most critical component of the district network.

In 2014 the entire district network connection to the rest of the world was 500 MB, or .5 GB.  This meant that all district network traffic shared a connection that is smaller than what is now used in many homes.  At the start of the 2022 school year, the average network utilization on a school day was over 9 GB and very close to the district capacity of 10 GB.  To address immediate connectivity concerns and allow for continued future growth, the networking team recently completed increasing our district network capacity from 10 GB to 40 GB.  When compared to district capacity in 2014, this represents an 8,000% increase in network capacity. 

Securing Beaverton School District networks, systems and data continues to be a primary area of focus for the IT Department.  The cyber intelligence provider Check Point Research reports that education and research suffered a 114 percent increase in cyber attacks over the past two years, making it the most attacked industry sector.1  These attacks include account compromise, ransomware, unauthorized access, and disclosure of student and staff personal data.  Worldwide, 64 percent of organizations in higher education and 56 percent in K-12 suffered ransomware attacks in 2021 2.  

Every two years, an external security assessment is conducted to assess areas of strength and areas for improvement of our cybersecurity posture.  The 2022 security assessment is in process and focusing upon these areas: 

•    Policies and practices

•    Web application vulnerability

•    Wireless network security

•    External penetration test

•    Internal penetration test

The assessment is aligned to standards defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and once the assessment is complete, IT Department staff will design the plan to address findings in the report. Over the past year, a number of significant cyber improvements have been accomplished.  Among the notable improvements were the removal of administrative access on workstations, implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA) for staff users, and launching the Hoxhunt Security Awareness platform for staff training. 

IT Department staff work closely with Teaching and Learning staff to ensure the Synergy student information system continues to meet needs of teachers and support the Teaching and Learning mission of the Beaverton School District.

This past year, the team completed the re-design of the Elementary Report Card to include and report student behavioral measures aligned to learning targets.  This work involved significant programming adjustments to the teacher interface and synergy reports and the result is improved information for parents on student progress.

Secondary teachers and students use the Canvas learning management system in addition to the student information system.  A past challenge has been connecting the student learning targets in Synergy to Canvas so they can be attached to formative assessments within Canvas.  This year, the development team was able to design a solution to this constraint and for the 2022 school year, learning targets in Synergy are now automatically available for use in Canvas.  This improvement saves teacher time and allows students to better understand assignment connections to subject learning targets. 

In May of 2022, Beaverton voters approved the 2022 bond.  The 2022 bond contains $44M of investments for student devices, networking upgrades and infrastructure support. Information Technology department staff are working on the following projects as part of the first year implementation of the 2022 bond. 

The majority of monies allocated from the bond are used to replace student devices.  Devices for high school students are scheduled to be replaced in fall of 2023 and devices for middle and elementary school students are scheduled to be replaced in fall 2024.  To prepare for the next round of student devices, IT staff collaborated with Teaching and Learning staff to collect input from students and staff on instructional requirements for the next round of student devices.  Vendor and device evaluation is in process with the team not only evaluating instructional use needs but also warranty, break/fix, and benchmarking to calculate total costs of ownership for student devices.  This selection process should be complete within two months. 

IT staff recently completed an upgrade of our virtual server environment.  The Beaverton School District utilizes a hybrid application model, including both cloud and on-premises servers as part of our application service delivery.  Now that the virtual server environment upgrade is complete, it is time to replace the hardware used by the virtual server environment and the team is designing the virtual server environment hardware replacement. 

Dark fiber is a strategy of leasing fiber optic network cables and maintaining the electronics on the points where those network connections enter buildings to connect school and ancillary sites.  The advantage of a dark fiber network is that monthly connection costs remain constant during the long-term lease agreement and the District has the ability to scale up network speeds by upgrading the electronics on the connections without incurring additional monthly costs.  

In 2017 as part of the 2014 bond, High and Options school sites were connected to the district via a dark fiber connection.  Construction has begun on phase 2 of the dark fiber network project and will connect half of elementary and middle schools.  Construction should be complete in Spring 2023.  The remaining schools will be in phase three which should be completed in Spring 2024.

When phase 3 is complete, all District sites will be on a long-term, leased fiber optic network.  In addition to the ability to scale to meet future network needs, ownership of the network will allow IT staff to best secure and optimize the network.