By Jenny Brooks, Writer, College of Arts and Sciences
While cyberattacks pose a serious threat to businesses, two-thirds of organizations globally are vulnerable to because they don’t have staff with the necessary skills, according to a 2025 report from the World Economic Forum. The Department of Computer Science in the School of Computer and Data Sciences is working to grow the pool of students interested in the field before they even get to college. It starts with high school teachers and the Cybersecurity Teacher Training Workshop, “Training the Trainers.”
The workshop is part of a larger state-funded project, secured by Professor of Computer Science Reza Rejaie, to promote cybersecurity education and training in Oregon: Nurturing Inclusive Cybersecurity Education (NICE). Training the Trainers teaches high school teachers how to teach cybersecurity with confidence, even when they don’t have prior expertise, using ready-to-teach materials from the NSA-approved RING curriculum.
“Cybersecurity is vitally important, but it can feel either inaccessible or esoteric to a typical high school student,” said Andrew Cronk, teacher, Southridge High School, Beaverton School District. “The great thing about the train-the-trainer approach is that not only do we gain knowledge about the world of cybersecurity, but we also learn teaching practices that help bring the curriculum alive for students.”
Cronk, a classically trained computer scientist, recently returned to teaching computer science. In reviewing the high school’s existing curriculum, he saw an opportunity to include a cybersecurity class but needed to grow his own knowledge to teach it.
“After participating in the NICE workshops this summer and last, I was very quickly able to ramp up my knowledge base and make very valuable connections with the community of cybersecurity teachers from across Oregon,” he said.
The training focuses on the NSA-approved RING cybersecurity curriculum, which introduces high school students to essential topics such as digital safety, ethical hacking, and risk management, aligning with national standards and real-world applications. All these subjects are part of SCDS’s bachelor’s and master’s degrees in cybersecurity.
From the Computer Science department, instructors included Dan Carrere, associate teaching professor, and Kenneth Nnadi, NICE program manager. Max Skorodinsky, research assistant in the Education Studies department, was also an instructor.
"Watching how the teachers learned and had fun learning and teaching one another about cybersecurity, even though some were initially scared due to their lack of cybersecurity knowledge, was amazing,” said Nnadi . “It was a very rewarding experience, and I enjoyed teaching the teachers and helping ensure that cybersecurity can reach every high school student in the state and nationwide, regardless of their social or economic status."
In 2026, the Department of Computer Science hosted two in-person workshops over the summer and one virtual workshop in February. The first summer workshop and the virtual workshop were supported by a HECC Workforce Ready grant and NICE. The July workshop was supported by the NSF-Funded Western Regional Noyce Network and served teachers who are Noyce Scholars/Fellows or alumni from western states.
To date, Training the Trainers has reached 53 Oregon high school teachers. The team also ran the first asynchronous cybersecurity competition for high school students in May. Nine high school teams, supervised by their teachers, participated in this event. Leadership in the Cybersecurity Center of Excellence is making plans to build on the success of the NICE project, which ended in June 2026, by organizing another cybersecurity competition for high school students and teachers, plus ongoing support for teacher professional development, in the coming school year.