"Collaboration as a Means to Build Capacity: Maryland's K-12 Cybersecurity Pathway"

Davina Pruitt-Mentle
Ex Director ETPRO/Co-PI National Cyberwatch Center
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This discussion will cover a brief overview of Maryland's statewide process to collaboratively build a comprehensive pathway from K-12 to partner two and four year institutions and workforce entry.

Additional school districts continue to add the Cybersecurity Career Technology Education (CTE) Program of Study, since its initial pilot in 2010. As part of a CTE program of study, students have the option of earning industry certification and/or early college credit related to the technical program. In this case, certification includes options in the Cisco series and CompTIA A+, Net+ and Security+ certifications. Recruitment efforts have included weighted credit for the pathway courses. In addition, engineering and the current State computer science pilot includes 2 cybersecurity related courses. The State DoEd is currently developing a Cybersecurity Technology course option. All 24 school districts have included C3 (Cyberethics, Cybersafety and Cybersecurity) content within their classroom discussion, and a focus on cybersecurity and other IT related careers has been added to the agenda. In this presentation we describe these and other on-going efforts to build a strong pipeline.