Kennewick School District information-technology staff on Thursday reviewed network capacity, device inventories, content-filtering upgrades and preliminary guidance for classroom use of artificial intelligence, and told the school board several tools and parent-facing controls will be rolled out in September.

The update, delivered by Eric Veach during the district’s board business meeting, outlined the district’s core technology infrastructure, student-device counts and planned policy steps. Veach said the district operates a 10-gigabit external internet connection with a 100-gigabit internal port leased between buildings, has layered on multifactor authentication and uses vendors for penetration testing and security monitoring.

Veach said the district can now account for about 17,500 Chromebooks and 4,500 iPads in its fleet and that device replacement is budgeted roughly on a five-year cycle. He said Chromebooks will continue to be the primary student device because they are “financially viable and easy to manage.”

The district’s web-filtering vendor, ContentKeeper, will be upgraded to a hybrid-cloud version that Veach said will add features to the parent app and lengthen storage of student web history. He said the district keeps on-site, off-site and “air-gapped” backups and that Critical Start provides 24/7 security monitoring. Veach described work with a penetration-testing firm (Trident) and monthly scans through the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

On student privacy and account management, Veach described RapidIdentity as the district’s onboarding/offboarding partner tied to PowerSchool enrollments and personnel lifecycle events; that process is used to enable and disable accounts when students or staff arrive or leave.

Veach said an acceptable-use prompt will be presented to students before they sign into district-managed Chromebooks; the district plans to enable that in mid-September so students must accept the policy before logging in. He also said a ContentKeeper parent app is scheduled for a September rollout to give parents additional controls.

The board discussed YouTube access. Veach said Google has changed its YouTube-for-education account rules so accounts need to be 18 or have parental permission; under the district’s Google domain, students are treated as 18 to allow embedded, teacher-curated videos to play in Schoology and Seesaw, but unrestricted browsing of YouTube will be limited. Veach said the district sets YouTube to restricted mode and that teachers can still embed videos for instruction.

Veach acknowledged the district retains web-history records primarily for incident review and law-enforcement requests; he said live monitoring alerts can flag concerning behavior and the IntelliKeeper update should allow smarter alerts and, in time, push some notifications to building administrators.

On artificial intelligence, Veach described district guidance for “using AI ethically and safely” and said administrators and teachers are working to integrate AI tools into instruction with clear parameters. The district has compiled a vetted list of AI tools the curriculum team and IT staff judge acceptable for classroom use because of data and privacy characteristics. The board asked for follow-up reporting: district leaders agreed to include progress on classroom use, adoption and evidence of improved tier‑1 instruction in the district’s midyear check-in to the board.

Veach also described LinkIt, a recently purchased data-warehouse tool the district is populating; he said attendance reporting views should be available to administrators by September and the system will support cohort studies and cross-referencing student data.

Board members asked how the district will measure teacher use of devices and AI in ways that improve instruction rather than simply replacing paper tasks. Veach and administrators said they will pursue classroom walkthrough data, principal reporting and surveys, and promised the board a status report at midyear. The district also said it will provide professional development on AI, with a keynote and breakout sessions planned for the start of the year and identified teacher cohorts already piloting classroom uses.

The district emphasized that most items discussed were implementation and planning steps; no formal board action was recorded on technology policies during the meeting.