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Lakeland presents annual internet-safety measures, outlines filtering, monitoring and data protections
Summary
Chief of Technology Dr. Wanda Terrell reviewed the district's required annual internet-safety presentation, describing layered filtering, monitoring tools, data-privacy steps and parental controls and answering board questions about dual enrollment access and app monitoring.
Dr. Wanda Terrell, Lakeland School System chief of technology, delivered the district's annual internet-safety presentation required by state law and described the layered technologies and policies the district uses to limit students' access to harmful online content and protect student data.
The presentation outlined a "walled garden" approach that limits what can enter and leave the district's digital environment and creates groups with differing access by grade, school or classroom. "This presentation is required by state law," a board member said when introducing the item, and Terrell described how the district implements that legal requirement.
Nut graf: The district told the board it balances instructional needs with cybersecurity by combining filtering and monitoring products, staff training, data-privacy agreements and incident response measures. Terrell said the system both restricts some student functions and gives teachers and parents tools to supervise learning while preserving needed access for high-school and dual-enrollment students.
Terrell listed the principal technical controls and services Lakeland uses: Google Workspace for Education Plus licenses, the district network provided by Educational Networks of America/Zayo, Lightspeed filtering (including Lightspeed Alert and Lightspeed Classroom), Bark for multimedia alerts, CrowdStrike for endpoint protection (deployed to staff devices under a Department of Homeland Security grant), SysCloud for Google Drive backups and membership in the Student Data Privacy Consortium to ease vendor privacy agreements. "We do not allow students to publish Google files to the internet," Terrell said, adding that teachers may share student work with parent permission.
She described account and access rules: elementary and middle school students do not have Gmail access even though they are assigned district Google accounts; high school students have Gmail, and the district recently added almost 1,000 college domains to permit dual-enrollment email communications. Terrell said dual-enrollment students are placed in a custom group so they can access university resources; she noted there are 174 individual dual-enrollment students this year.
Terrell explained classroom and behavioral controls, including a digital-restriction feature that can be used as a behavioral consequence or at a parent's request to limit a student to curricular material. Lightspeed Classroom gives teachers the ability to restrict websites during instruction, and Lightspeed Alert notifies instructional-technology staff about potential bullying or explicit material. She also described routine cybersecurity work: two annual maturity reviews (NCSR and CSAT), biweekly phishing tests, mandatory FERPA training for staff and multifactor authentication for staff accounts.
Parents are given a Lightspeed Parent Portal that shows a weekly summary and, if parents create an account, every URL a child visited and the ability to pause internet access on the child's Chromebook at home. Terrell said the district can perform digital forensics when violations are reported and that, in many instances, investigations have shown false alarms.
Board members asked about monitoring within web apps and confidence that the district can detect problematic content that appears inside embedded applications. Terrell said the layered tools give strong coverage and that Bark and Lightspeed provide overlapping alerts: "I'll never say it's 100%." Jeremy Burnett asked whether .edu could be opened broadly for college communications; Terrell explained administrators supply domain lists and Lakeland added domains from a spreadsheet provided by counselors.
The superintendent and staff noted that teachers may request that blocked sites be reviewed and reclassified when needed for instruction. Terrell said staff will enable Google Takeout for seniors at a planned time to let graduates export their work and encouraged students and families to begin drive cleanups before graduation.
Ending: Terrell closed by inviting board questions and offering follow-up support to staff and families. Board members praised the work and asked for comparative and trend data to be included in future updates.
