Technology director outlines Wi‑Fi overhaul, fiber outages and cybersecurity partnerships
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Summary
Director of Technology DJ Scullen told trustees the district will replace roughly 240 wireless access points, recover from two fiber cuts earlier this year, and continue cybersecurity work with UW‑Whitewater and the Wisconsin Cyber Response Team.
The Fort Atkinson School District's technology director told the board Feb. 19 that the district will replace its aging Wi‑Fi infrastructure and highlighted recent network outages caused by construction crews.
DJ Scullen said the district plans to replace "all of those and it's like 240 of them district wide," referring to ceiling-mounted Wi‑Fi access points, and described two rare but impactful fiber breaks earlier this school year. "A backhoe happens to find a very critical underground cable," he said, recounting an early‑season outage, and later described a second break on Madison Avenue that affected both the district and Madison College.
Scullen described improvements in monitoring and logging that will help IT staff detect and repair outages proactively, and said district staff will present at the Brainstorm IT conference about open‑source monitoring tools and a cybersecurity panel organized with UW‑Whitewater. He also summarized collaboration with the Wisconsin Cyber Response Team and participation in a December joint military exercise that simulated red-team/blue-team cyber incidents.
Board members asked about device counts and staffing; Scullen said the district supports roughly 2,300 students with Chromebooks and has additional loaner devices. Trustees praised the small IT team's work and the district's proactive cybersecurity posture.
The report was informational; no board action was required.
