Written into the strategic plan five years ago, Ector County ISD has achieved the Trusted Learning Environment Seal from the Consortium for School Networking.
The path toward the designation — meant to protect ECISD’s network — has been a long one and the district is not done. They want to improve on what they have so far and they also have to resubmit every two years.
“The Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) Trusted Learning Environment Seal is a prestigious recognition awarded to school systems that demonstrate a strong commitment to protecting student data and privacy. For ECISD to earn this seal, we had to meet rigorous standards across five critical areas: leadership, classroom, data security, business, and professional development. Acquiring the TLE Seal is considered an elite achievement, as it signifies that a school has implemented comprehensive and forward-thinking practices to safeguard student information in the digital age,” Chief Information Officer Kelie Wilks said.
“This recognition not only elevates a school’s reputation but also assures parents, students, and the community that the institution prioritizes data protection and responsible technology use in education. This achievement is no easy task and the ECISD TLE Team that worked on this is outstanding,” Wilks added.
Director of Digital Learning Lauren Tavarez said they have formed a full-time cybersecurity team to monitor their computer networks 24/7. Tavarez said students are often a target for cyber attacks.
People can steal a 5-year-old’s identity, for example, and use it for 13 years until the child turns 18 and before anyone catches it.
“They have now destroyed this child’s credit and it’s a mess. It’s bad. We want to be able to do anything we can to prevent things like that. … Education is a huge part of this. Just training and teaching the people in the system, whether it be students or staff, how to safely and securely navigate in a digital world, has been a big part of it,” Tavarez said.
The district has redesigned its approach to staff development to make it more manageable and understandable and is offering digital citizenship lessons for students. District devices that go to students do not have access to social media either at school or at home.
“We have a module that staff completes three times a year. That’s broken down into manageable chunks that really focus on best practices, not only professionally, but also personally. That helps them with their,” life outside of school and helps them safely navigate the web, Tavarez said.
Another big thing they’ve done as part of earning the Trusted Learning Environment Seal is putting processes in place for requesting and purchasing resources, helping to narrow down the number of items available.
When someone wants to purchase something, whether it’s digital or not, it is reviewed by a committee looking for things like where the data is collected and stored because they want to make sure it’s not overseas “because it’s not subject to the same laws” that would protect it if it was the U.S., Tavarez said.
“That team is also looking for alignment, looking to see if they have products doing more than one thing,” she said.
“That also helps us to make those decisions. Sometimes people don’t even realize that we’ve already purchased something that can do” what they need, she added.
The Trusted Learning Environment is something retiring Superintendent Scott Muri had brought up because he had been in districts that had the seal.
“We’re the ninth district in the state of Texas to earn this. It actually took us two submissions and three years of work to get this. … When you submit, they give you feedback and suggestions on the things that you need to continue to work on and the reasons why we didn’t necessarily get at that time. So we felt like, instead of immediately turning around and trying to apply again, we wanted to work on it for a year,” Tavarez said.
“We were able to get some more big things in place. Data interoperability is something that our Information Systems team has been working on this year. That was really kind of what pushed us past the line to be able to earn this. They have done some great work with our online programs and the way that our online programs are rostered.
“When you think about data interoperability, it’s the way that our system is passing information to the products and the vendors that we have, and having as few manual processes as possible. You want to be very immediate and very automatic, because that increases the security also. They’ve developed a data dictionary. … Even our attendance clerks and our friends at the campus know how important (it is) when they put the information into the system for students, and it’s got to be accurate, it’s got to be clean, it’s got to be following the guidelines and the expectations that are set by our student information system, so that it’ll all talk to each other digitally,” she added.
