Senior IT officials from Texas and Pennsylvania agreed this week at the Route Fifty Tech Summit that the key to success in meeting cybersecurity challenges is collaboration among all the governmental entities – Federal, state and local – along with their vendor partners.

A slim majority of U.S. high schools – 51 percent – now offer foundational computer science, a significant jump from just 35 percent in 2018, according to a new report from Code.org.

To help close the broadband digital divide, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has proposed an enhanced competition incentive program to encourage licensees to offer opportunities for small carriers and Tribal Nations to obtain spectrum via lease, partition, or disaggregation.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has announced 18 new broadband projects the state will undertake in an effort to close the digital divide.

The Tennessee Department of Human Services (TDHS) has announced an expansion of the state’s MyTN mobile app.

Data is one of the most important tools in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. Citizens need accurate data to understand the virus and access vaccinations while public health officials need up-to-date information to track COVID-19 and evaluate immunization effectiveness. MeriTalk spoke with Jim Daniel, who leads state and local public health for Amazon Web Services (AWS), to learn how access to public health data has improved and how it may change in the future.

The University of Southern Mississippi (USM) is using a grant from the Governor’s Emergency Education Response (GEER) fund program to make Learning Blade software available to all middle schools statewide free of charge.

In the wake of a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report encouraging the Departments of Education and Homeland Security (DHS) to update K-12 cybersecurity guidance, several Democrat senators have written to both agencies urging them to heed GAO’s recommendations, and establish critical infrastructure council structures to advance the issue.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced most state and local governments (SLGs) to undergo rapid modernization. For many, modernization has meant adopting a new suite of software services to meet citizen needs as the government shifted to remote work and digital service delivery.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan announced that the state has appointed its first chief privacy officer and its first chief data officer.