As a school district tech director who puts data privacy at the top of his priority list, Jun Kim says ânoâ a lot.
No, that app doesnât have sufficient privacy protections. No, you canât bring a new platform into your classroom just because you like it. No, you canât use that technology until you fill out these forms.
All those ânoâ responses can be exhausting for himâand the districtâs teachers and school leaders. So when Kim, the director of technology for Moore public schools outside Oklahoma City, stepped into his job about a decade ago, he had a ready-made hashtag to poke fun at his professional role: #junbrokeit.
Adding the faux social media signifier to many of his emails is Kimâs way of showing he gets it: Making technology work for teaching and learning while prioritizing things like securing student data can be time-consuming and frustrating.
Itâs self-effacing, empathetic, just plain funnyâthe embodiment of Kimâs leadership style, said Amy Simpson, the principal of Mooreâs Oakridge Elementary School.
âHe is taking ownership of the technology ups and downs that we face in the district,â she said. Though Kim doesnât use the âbroke itâ joke often these days, he still champions the message that âitâs OK to push the boundaries and be innovative and do these things that are going to give our kids the skills they need to be lifelong learners. But at the same time, understand things may fail, and thatâs OK, too.â
And if technologyâor the districtâs policies and procedures around itâarenât working for particular staffers, they know who is responsible. âHeâs saying, âDonât go blame anyone else. Iâm the leader. Jun broke it,ââ Simpson said.
Kimâs sense of humor is counterbalanced by what he says his wife calls his take-action, âmilitary voice,â honed over the more than three decades that Kim has juggled his work as an educatorâteacher, coach, administrator, principal, district tech directorâwith military service, mostly in the Oklahoma National Guard.
âIf the military has taught me one thing, itâs that you look at processes, how you make [them], while taking care of your people,â Kim said. âTechnology nowadays, itâs a dime a dozen. You can throw whatever tech in there you want, but if people donât care, if they donât know how to use it, itâs a paperweight.â
Spreading his know-how throughout the state
Kim has not only set up and consistently refined a thoroughâbut educator-friendlyâprocess for vetting platforms to help secure student and staff information in his own district, heâs also helped ensure the entire state can benefit from his knowledge and from his districtâs understanding of how to keep student and staff data safe.
Kim, whose suburban district is the fourth largest in the state at more than 25,600 students, leads a team of 37 full-time staff and six high school student interns.
That level of technology support is much higher than what most districts in the Sooner State have, said Jack Green, a former district tech director and a founding member of Oklahomaâs chapter of the Consortium for School Networking.
âMost of Oklahoma is rural and has one person at most thatâs responsible for information technology,â Green said. And tech is far from their only role, he added. âTypically, theyâre driving a bus, they may be serving as custodian, a principal, a teacher, a superintendent.â
That leaves little time for scrutinizing the fine print on software contracts to understand how educational technology companies will collect and use student data. So Kim has worked to create a of platforms, applications, and programs that have been vetted for data-privacy practices by districts around the state.
Tech officials in smaller districts with fewer resources can use the clearinghouse to see what platforms other districts have signed off on and share expectations on data privacy.
âStudent-data privacy is his baby,â said Sherri Pankhurst, the assistant superintendent of the Cleveland public schools, a 1,500-student district near Tulsa. âI come from a smaller, rural district. The manpower is not thereâ to properly vet even payroll software, she said. âAnd so, for him to take that charge, to lead a state-level initiative to help schoolsâ is very helpful.
Kim helped the district rebuild after a deadly tornado
Born in South Korea, Kim, 52, moved to the United States when he was about 6 for his fatherâs job at General Motors. The family lived in Michigan and Ohio before settling down in Moore, where Kim started as a 3rd grader and went on to graduate from high school.
Growing up, Kimâs parents used to joke that he always liked to âsee who the newest baby in the neighborhood was,â Kim recalled. âIâve always been interested in working with kids and just have a love for little ones.â
Teaching was a natural fit.
But right before Kim entered college, his father was laid off from GM. He still offered to take out loans to cover his sonâs tuition, but Kim saw a different path. He joined the Air Force Reserve of the U.S. Air Force, then later transferred to the Oklahoma National Guard. Heâs served in the military for 32 years and counting, beginning as a weapons loader for F-16 fighter jets. Heâs also worked as a stinger operator, graphic artist, public affairs supervisor, and human resources adviser.
In 2013, while he was deployed in Afghanistan, Kim learned he had been selected as the districtâs director of technology.
Just days after returning from a war zone, Kim found himself fighting a different kind of battle when a major tornado hit Moore in May. Seven elementary school students in the district were killed when a school building was destroyed. The storm demolished two schools and damaged other facilities, including the building that housed key district information, recalled Robert Romines, Mooreâs current superintendent.
âAll of our data from payroll, employee records, student data, anything that you can think of was within that building. That was a total loss,â said Romines, who was the personnel director at the time the storm hit but was already slated to step into the superintendentâs role. The district was able to recover some serversâwithout which Moore would not have been able to open its doors in time for the beginning of the next school year in August, Romines said.
There was no better way to underscore the importance of keeping data secure and backing it up, Romines said. âWe needed to ensure that we had redundant servers that would continue working in the event of another catastrophic event here,â he said.
Kim coordinated the recovery and rebuilding of the districtâs technology infrastructure with staff, internet providers, and vendors.
The experience taught him to always âoverplan. Ask what ifs,â even if it seems a little nutty, Kim said. âIâve swapped out the âaluminum foil hatâ to a âbigger-brimmed [aluminum foil] sombrero,â he joked.
Data security is paramount in the age of AI
These days, Kim and thousands of other education technology directors are walking a tricky tightrope as they work to make the most of a rapidly changing ed-tech landscape that is already revolutionizing learningâwithout endangering student data.
Thousands of applications and platforms can spark student engagement, make classroom organization easier, or personalize instruction for students. And school systems are embracing them: Districts around the country accessed an average of 2,591 distinct ed-tech tools during the 2022-23 school year, .
At the same time, cyberattacks of all sorts are becoming increasingly common in K-12 schools. Eighty percent of K-12 schools had been targeted by ransomware, according to a survey of IT professionals conducted last year by Sophos, a cybersecurity firm. Thatâs a higher percentage than any other industry surveyed, including health care and financial services.
Cyberattacks can cost districts millions of dollars and days or even weeks of missed learning time. Hackers have applied for credit cards in childrenâs names and sent threatening messages to parents. And student-data privacy challenges will likely grow bigger as artificial intelligenceâwhich relies on massive amounts of dataâpowers more and more ed-tech tools.
Most districts are on their own fighting this tidal wave of attacks, many of which come from shadowy overseas criminal gangs.
Under Kimâs leadership, Moore has been ahead of the curve in paying attention to the potential dangers for student information to fall into the wrong hands.
Back in 2018, even before the pandemic sparked a massive expansion in the use of education technology, Kim began requiring teachers who wanted to use an application not already approved by the district to submit it for vetting.
He asked vendors to fill out a survey explaining, among other things, what kind of data they collect about students and how they plan to use it. Will they promise to destroy Mooreâs student data when the relationship with the district has ended? He and his team also work to get a sense of how each program or application will integrate with the districtâs other technologies.
Kim has the curriculum team look separately at the app or software to make sure it is in line with how the district wants to approach a particular topic or subject. Heâll also point teachers to software or programs the district already has that may meet their needs as well asâif not better thanâthe program they are asking about.
Kim works to make sure teachers understand the reasons behind these procedures so that his requests for information about a platform they might want to use feel more meaningful than a tangle of red tape.
âHe does a really good job of explaining the why versus just saying, âOh, weâve got to do this, because weâve got to protect student-data privacy,ââ said Laura Rousseau, the principal of South Ridge Junior High. âFor us, as educators, the why is important. We expect our kids to understand the why when theyâre learning things. And he does the same for us. He tells us the nitty-gritty behind policy changes and procedure changes.â
Kim is also willing to change course if his colleagues say they have a better way to do something or that a procedure isnât working. Whenever a big policy or process change is in the offing, Kim will present it to principals first to get a sense of how to refine and message it to teachers and other district employees.
âBefore [a policy] goes out to our thousands of employees and thousands of students, weâre able to digest it, and shoot holes in it, and troubleshoot,â Rousseau said. Kim asks how the district can enable people âin the school building to find success with whatever digital thing weâre needing to use,â Rousseau said.
Kimâs openness to othersâ ideas and willingness to listen to their frustrations make it easier for Mooreâs educators to hear, for example, that a long-beloved application or platform has updated its privacy policy and is no longer allowed in Moore. Thatâs something that often happens with STEM apps, Rousseau said.
While Kim will try to find a safer alternative to replace a platform that no longer meets Mooreâs privacy standards, sometimes there simply isnât one.
âWe can get very mad at Jun sometimes,â Rousseau conceded. âBut I think everybody knows that at the end of the day, heâs having to put himself in a position to protect us from any long-term consequences that can come from our data getting out into the world where we donât want it.â
Complicating Kimâs communications challenge: The impact of all this work is largely invisible. Itâs hard to celebrate the student data that werenât stolen or the hack that was thwarted.
The closest thing to a public victory: Hackers did hit Moore last year in what Kim deems a âcyber event.â The systems Kim put in place helped keep sensitive student data out of their hands, Romines said. Within an hour, Mooreâs tech was back up and running.
Though Kim has spent years refining and reworking Mooreâs process, he âwill be the first to tell you weâre nowhere near where we need to beâ when it comes to data privacy, Romines said. âI donât think weâll ever be where we need to be because [technology means] a constant change. And he just does a really good job on thinking out toward the future and doing what needs to be done.â
Keeping students âdigitally safeâ
Kim sees securing student data as just another part of a schoolâs directive to protect its students.
â69´ŤĂ˝ are really great about trying to keep kids safe, right? Physically safe, emotionally safe,â Kim said. âNow, itâs just a matter of: Can we keep them digitally safe?â
That mission encompasses all children, not just the ones in Moore, he added. âOur whole focus has been our kids, whether theyâre my kids in Moore or kids in Gotebo, Oklahoma, or Cleveland, Oklahoma, it doesnât matter. Theyâre still kids, and we still want to protect kidsâ information.â
Thatâs why in 2022, Kim played a leading role in developing Oklahomaâs Student Data Privacy Consortium, which gives participating districts access to resources for vetting software, plus lists of programs and platforms other districts have approved. At least 26 other states have similar organizations.
Data-privacy work has largely been a scattershot, district-by-district affair. Getting multiple districts to team up on the challenge can be a major boon for school systems with limited resourcesâand can even make life easier for vendors, experts say.
âIf you build a sort of a collaborative, or cohort of people who are deeply, deeply engaged in the work, then you spread the knowledge at scale,â said Linnette Attai, the project director for CoSNâs Student Data Privacy Initiative and Trusted Learning Environment Program.
Kim demurs when others credit him as the driving force behind Oklahomaâs statewide privacy work, his colleagues say.
âHe brags about maybe how far the state has come or the districts have come, but he never gives himself credit for any of it,â said Emily Monroe, an education technology specialist in Moore. âHe goes above and beyond for so many districts across the state. He is really a mentor to a lot of other ed-tech directors and IT directors across the state. And when weâre at a conference with him, heâs like a rock star. Everyone knows him.â
