August 27, 2015
THIS WEEK IN
VO LUM E 28 | IS S U E 40 | FREE
LIFE
LOCAL
How new digital technologies are changing etiquette.
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HighlandsRanchHerald.net A publication of
D O U G L A S C O U N T Y, C O L O R A D O
DOUGLAS COUNTY SCHOOLS
Safety touted as top priority Board meeting features review of five-year plan By Mike DiFerdinando mdiferdinando@colorado communitymedia.com
Two volunteers from the Highlands Ranch Outreach Uganda nonprofit organization traveled to Uganda to help build a primary school in Agwata to hold 500 students, preschool to sixth grade. In this photo, a volunteer helps mix cement. Courtesy photos
Group reaches out to Uganda
Organization helps women generate income
By Taryn Walker twalker@coloradocommunitymedia.com With eight years under its belt, $1.5 million raised and more than 200 children sponsored, Highland Ranch’s Outreach Uganda is going strong. “I was thinking I knew poverty. You think you’ve seen it, and then you go over there and realize they have no government support whatsoever,” organization president Carol Davis said. “It’s very different. People are starving and they don’t even have 25 cents to buy medicine to prevent things like diarrhea — and sadly, children die of it.” The organization, with offices in Highlands Ranch, Fort Collins and northern Uganda, started in 2007 with an initiative to help women in northern Uganda improve their incomes, Davis said. It focuses on tackling poverty in the small city of Jinja, town of Kitgumgroup and village of Agwata. The nonprofit works with more than 210 women on income-generation projects by selling crafts such as beaded jewelry, hand-painted silk scarves and cloths at local events and online. For 20 years, the landlocked country in East Africa was ravaged by guerrilla group leader Joseph Kony, whose campaign was responsible for internally displacing millions of people, including women and children. The displacement camps had huts spaced only a few feet apart and housed more than 10,000 women who were held at gunpoint and brutalized, Davis said. Outreach Uganda has more than 80 volunteers and a five-member board with an office in Davis’ basement. She has a background in public accounting and has always been interested in helping women in Uganda, she said. She now spends three months a year there. When Davis first arrived in Uganda in 2009, she began working with impoverished women just as the war ended. She inquired about selling the women’s crafts in America for a profit and they accepted. Now, Ugandan women use the money made from craft sales to reinvest in businesses and education, she said. “You have to know that we live in a global world and just because we can’t
The Douglas County School District says safety is its top priority. During a review of the district’s fiveyear plan at its Aug. 18 board meeting, Douglas County Schools addressed the measures the district has taken in recent years to provide more security for students, teachers and staff. “We recognized that is absolutely our number one priority in the district, and we wanted Fagen to be transparent about it in as much of a way as we could, given the nature of safety,” Superintendent Elizabeth Fagen said. In 2009, school radios couldn’t communicate with first responders, the district had no student tracking or bus accountability, and school buildings were
Security continues on Page 8
Digital security plays growing role By Mike DiFerdinando mdiferdinando@coloradocommunitymedia.com
Carol Davis of Outreach Uganda in Highlands Ranch took a trip to Uganda in February to work with women in Jinja. look out our window and see children dying, it’s happening,” she said. “These people don’t have anybody living over there that can help take care of them.” Northern Ugandan women have always had a high priority for instilling education in their community, and before Highlands Ranch residents began helping, residents only had a mud building, 20 students and unpaid and untrained teachers. As of July, Davis proudly said the school has 498 students, kindergarten through sixth grades and a nursery. “There is no other school in their district that is doing this well. We were able to help them build four classrooms and take care of nursery students,” Davis said. “We’ve worked on a two-month campaign to build them a playground near the school, because all they have is a soccer field with posts. We partnered with another non-profit to build a $12,000 playground that will last more than 10 years.” Also on the group’s radar is a special project to keep second- through fourthUganda continues on Page 8
Adong Grace of Uganda shows off a multicolored oval necklace she made. Highlands Ranch’s Outreach Uganda sells crafts and jewelry made by Ugandan women to support their economy and incomes.
In addition to the mental well-being and physical safety of students and teachers, digital security has become a major priority for the Douglas County School District. “It’s 2015, big corporations are hacked on a daily basis, customer information is compromised, and we’re all condition to accept that as the new reality,” said Chief Technology Officer Gautam Sethi. “We believe student data is much more critical than any other customer data.” To that end, all website traffic on the district network, including both wired and wireless access, passes through an enterprise-level content filtering system. The content filter uses both a centralized database of websites maintained by the content filter vendor and a locally managed blocked-site list. The vendor database covers millions of sites, and it is updated in real time. When questionable web content is accessed and reported, IT staff initially block the site and resubmit the URL of the site for recategorization by the vendor. District filters enforce Google, Bing and Yahoo search-engine traffic to use the safe-search functionality, including for image searching. Browser visits to search engines on the district network default to the safe-search preference. More than 50,000 devices connect to the district’s wireless network daily from 3,500 access points. The district has 86,000 active email accounts and circulates 450,000 emails and 20,000 documents daily.