Question 1: What does the district have budgeted for cybersecurity?
In 2024 the district’s Information Technology office spent
$26.8 million
This year, the budget was cut to only $20.3 million.
It’s split into three divisions: Technical Services and Customer Experience; Application Development and Operations; Infrastructure Services and Cybersecurity.
For years, the cybersecurity division had the lowest budget of the three.
That changed this year, but the district is already trying to invest more money in different areas. The proposed 2026 budget increases the IT budget by over $4 million, but only $400,000 of that is for cybersecurity. Most of it is for “developing new data systems.”
We’ll see if that changes following this attack.
Question 2: What does that money get spent on?
More than half of the district’s IT budget is payroll for 72 full-time equivalent employees. An average of $154,000 each.
Chief IT officer Thomas Jones makes $227,000. Got a $12,000 raise last year.
Underneath him there are nine IT directors and managers each making between $130-170,000, but only one of them is focused on security.
$4.2 million contracted services, $2.5 million equipment.
(And Infrastructure Services and Cybersecurity isn’t even entirely focused on security, it also includes infrastructure workers making sure telephone and wi-fi services are running properly.)
Question 3: What are other large school districts spending on cybersecurity?
A Homeland Security
study released last October found an almost 400% increase in public school cyberattacks over a six-year period. They also found that as of 2022, schools were only spending an average of 8% of their IT budget on cybersecurity.
Then in the two months after the report came out, there were
85 more attacks.
Houston spending $62 million on IT (twice the size of Baltimore).