The Maine Department of Education’s (DOE) Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI) awarded a total of $1.5 million in Cyber Performance Grants to 61 Maine school administrative units (SAUs). These grants fund SAU projects to upgrade end-of-service infrastructure, strengthen managed detection and response for network security, firewalls, and cloud backup services, and to provide professional learning.
The grants were in response to the federal Cybersecurity Act and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) report on K12 education Protecting Our Future, which provides schools with recommendations. These include implementing multifactor authentication, security awareness training, professional development, system backups, patch management, minimizing threat exposure, incident response plans, and investments in CISA’s Cyber Performance Goals. Maine Schools continue to learn and progress through the implementation of CISA’s recommendations.