Whether your kids are starting back to school to begin their first day in kindergarten, or it’s the last time you’re moving them back into an apartment or a house as they get ready to finish their last year of college, it’s easy to think back to a time when we were the ones, who were heading back into class.

Of course, when it comes to making sure that our students have everything they need, there are few “must have” school supplies that rivaled the popularity of the Mead “Trapper Keeper”.

Launched in 1981, the Trapper Keeper, with its retro cover designs and multiple folders with vertical pockets worked perfectly (for kids of all ages) for holding all of their notes in place no matter what happened.

With an original price of $4.85, the Trapper Keeper saved time, stress, and locker space. In fact, the all-in-one organizers were so popular that adults started buying them as well. That may explain why Mead was able to sell more than 75 million of them, with some of the designs becoming collectors’ items.

So, what in the name of E. Bryant Crutchfield and Jon Wyant does an 1980’s era pocket folder have to do with cybersecurity? Let me explain…

Here in Indiana, there are more than 2,200 urban, suburban, and rural K-12 schools, with 1.2 million students and about the only thing there’s “more of” (aside from textbooks) is the amount of personal identifying information (PII) that exists within these school districts; that’s the data that exists on every student, as well as their family members, even their emergency contacts. That’s just one of the reasons why the education sector experienced a 44 percent increase in cyberattacks from 2021 to 2022. What’s more, the value of a full data set, enough to steal someone’s identity, costs as much as $1,000 on the dark web.

Fortunately, just as the Trapper Keeper was ideal for helping to make sure nothing important was lost, there is a wealth of cybersecurity resources that are FREE to download using the Cybersecurity for Education Toolkit 2.0.

First developed in 2020 and updated in 2023 by the Indiana Executive Council on Cybersecurity (IECC), in partnership with the Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency (CISA) and the Indiana Department of Education, It is geared for everyone in a school community including staff, school board members and superintendents, as well as the rest of us, regardless of whether or not you had kids in school.

In addition to the Toolkit and the information you’ll find on the Indiana Cybersecurity Hub website, there’s more being done with cybersecurity to help protect keep these critical systems secure.

if you’re a part of a school’s technology department, there is a program known as Cybertrack, which is designed to put local school districts (and local governments) in contact with top-tier cybersecurity experts. It is a no-cost program – through sponsorship from the Indiana Office of Technology – that provides an actionable cybersecurity assessment report.

More and more, we’re reminded each day about how cybersecurity is intertwined into the fabric of our everyday life, whether we’re at home, at work, or at school and whenever we’re online. And while it’s easy – for a lot of reasons – to sigh a little bit, at the prospect of knowing we have to be prepared by following a few (otherwise) simple steps, or making sure we’ve done everything we can to protect ourselves and our personal data, it’s good to know that once we’ve done that, we’ll have that same level of confidence that some of us had when we were walking around at school with our oh-so-cool Trapper Keeper!

Here's hoping it’s a cybersafe school year!