These are tumultuous times for public education. We began the new year with a teacher strike in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The year’s second month brought another teacher strike, this time in Oakland USD. And the financial strife is not just limited to big cities. Districts across California, small and large — urban, suburban and rural — are making deep cuts to counter rising costs and to maintain solvency.

When the demands for higher pay, lower class sizes, more staff and increased services meet the reality of insufficient resources, the inevitable result is the labor strife we are now experiencing. Teachers are not wrong to expect salaries and conditions more commensurate with the value of the work they perform. District leaders are not wrong to balance the desire for greater staff compensation and support with concern for fiscal stability, which is also a precondition for student success. Both sides have been forced into an untenable situation through decisions made not in local communities, union headquarters or district offices, but instead at the Capitol in Sacramento.

The report, “Early Adopters: State Approaches to Testing School Drinking Water for Lead in the United States,” concluded that 3 percent of California’s K-12 public schools had at least one tap with an elevated level of lead in water and 1 percent of all taps tested in the California’s public schools had shown lead levels at or above the level requiring action — 15 parts per billion per one liter of water.

Those results are based on testing at just 22 percent of the state’s more than 10,000 K-12 public schools. Previously, California offered schools free tap water testing for lead on a voluntary basis through a program of the State Water Resources Control Board. Now, under Assembly Bill 746 (Fletcher-Gonzalez, D-San Diego), community water systems are required to test five outlets at all California public K-12 school sites that were constructed before Jan. 1, 2010 by July 1. According to the California State Water Resources Control Board, less than half of California’s roughly 11,000 public schools (4,429) have been tested so far.

K-12 local educational agencies nationwide experienced both more frequent and more significant cybersecurity incidents in 2018, according to a new report from the K-12 Cybersecurity Resource Center. Data suggests the incidents did not discriminate by district type, location or size.

There were 122 publicly reported K-12 cyber incidents in the U.S. in 2018, or about one incident every three days. A map on the center’s website shows the location of every reported cyber incident since 2016, in addition to a description of the attack. Mt. Diablo Unified School District in Contra Costa County was one of two districts nationwide to report more than one incident in 2018.

Data breaches were the most common type of cyber incident or threat reported in 2018, with just over half of those carried out or caused by members of the impacted school community, whether by staff or students. Other prominent forms of cyber incidents explored in the report are phishing attacks, largely by email, and ransomware and malware outbreaks. “Perhaps most concerning in 2018 were a number of successful phishing attacks targeted at school district business officials,” the report states. Phishing is the practice of sending bogus emails that appear to be from a reputable company, but are actually bait designed to trick the recipient into providing personal or sensitive information such as passwords or checking account, credit card and Social Security numbers.

Dana Dean: “In Congress, we met with our representatives to share the importance of modernizing and fully funding the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. We also discussed the importance of updating the Higher Education Act to include real, substantial funding for more and better teacher training to help stem the growing teacher shortage.

From my view, we were very well received, as was our message. I visited directly with Rep. Mike Thompson, Rep. John Garamendi, and Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, as well as all their chiefs of staff and education-focused legislative staff. I also had a chance to call on Rep. Eric Swalwell’s chief of staff, Alex Evans.