Consortium for School Networking

The Consortium for School Networking is alarmed by the Administration’s decision to eliminate the staff of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology and significantly reduce cybersecurity services that protect K-12 schools. These actions threaten the progress of digital learning, widen inequities in student access to technology and expose school districts to increased cybersecurity risks. Educators across the country rely on the federal government’s technical assistance and guidance to navigate the opportunities and challenges of educational technology.

The Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) launched the Digital Equity Dashboard, an innovative and practical tool designed to help school districts and communities leverage data to close digital equity gaps. The dashboard integrates various national data sets into one comprehensive dashboard.

The Consortium for School Networking's 2021 report  includes IT leadership and infrastructure findings to give school districts and policymakers a holistic understanding of the K-12 technological landscape. This year’s 10 top findings are:

1. Efforts to expand broadband access outside of school have increased dramatically. In 2020, 51 percent of district tech leaders provided off-campus internet services, but in 2021, that nearly doubled to 95 percent.

The Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA), State E-rate Coordinators' Alliance (SECA), Allianced for Excellent Education (All4Ed), Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition (SHLB) and the Council of the Great City Schools (CGCS) submitted to the Federal Communications Commission an estimate outlining the cost to provide much-needed cybersecurity protections to US K-12 school districts and a petition for declaratory relief and rulemaking urging the agency to expand the E-rate program to cover these protections.