Rob Dickson is the CIO of Wichita Public Schools, the largest school district in Kansas, serving just under 50,000 students across 87 schools and programs throughout the Wichita metro area. In a role that spans both operational and instructional technology, Rob oversees cybersecurity and infrastructure alongside a portfolio of forward-looking educational initiatives that includes a public micro school, an immersive coding program, a hub for advanced cybersecurity and machine learning education built in partnership with Wichita State University, and a summer STEM camp serving 800 middle school students. He brings a career that started in the U.S. Air Force and spans 27 years in education technology to one of the most ambitious public school technology programs in the country. 

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• How Wichita Public Schools built Future Ready Centers where students learn advanced manufacturing, BioMed, and cybersecurity in environments that look nothing like classrooms
• Why Rob draws a sharp line between productive struggle and cognitive offload, and why getting that balance right is the most important AI challenge in education today
• How AI-powered tabletop exercises running on continuous improvement cycles are changing how Rob's team builds and tests its security posture
• Why 900 job applicants for a single data analyst position turned out to be a social engineering threat vector and what Rob did about it
• Why Rob is hiring students from WSU Tech to do real cybersecurity work and refresh 45,000 devices this summer
• Why skills now have life cycles measured in years rather than careers, and what that means for how schools and post-secondary institutions need to rethink what they teach
• Why the superintendent who gives his team room to take risks is the most important ingredient in everything Wichita is building
  
  
  

In this episode…

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This episode is brought to you by CyberLynx.com  

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Check out previous episodes:

From 45-Year Mainframe to AI Campus: Loyola's CIO on What Works with Alan Schomaker - Ep 221

You Can't Outrun a Script: AI Security in a Law Firm with Michael Massey - Ep 220

Why AI Rollouts Fail and What Employers Did Differently with Kelley Kage - Ep 219 

Transcript: 

Rob Dickson

CIO 

Wichita Public Schools

Matthew Connor: Matthew Connor here, host of the Cyber Business Podcast. Today we're joined by Rob Dickson, CIO at Wichita Public Schools. Rob, welcome to the show.

Rob Dickson: Hey, thanks for having me.

Matthew Connor: Thanks for coming on. Before we get too far in, a quick word from our sponsors. Hackers are getting smarter — is your security keeping up? Cyberlynx sells industry-leading, AI-powered cybersecurity solutions that detect threats in real time, so you know about an attack before the damage is done, not after. Learn more at cyberlynx.com. And now back to our show.

Rob, for those who aren't familiar, can you tell us about Wichita Public Schools and your role there as CIO?

Rob Dickson: Sure. We're the largest school district in Kansas — just under 50,000 students across about 87 schools and programs, covering essentially the entire Wichita metro area. My role as CIO sits on both the instructional and operational sides. On the operational side it's infrastructure and cybersecurity — keeping the lights on. On the instructional side, I helped start the virtual school here, which is actually my third virtual school I've been part of. I also oversee digital citizenship and literacy, a public micro school called Creative Minds for K through 6, our Verizon Innovative Learning Schools program across ten middle schools, and Spate, which is an immersive coding school for elementary kids. And we just opened The Hack, which I'll get into.

Matthew Connor: So not much going on. With all your free time. What you're doing there is genuinely impressive — and not what most people would expect from a public school district in the middle of America. You'd think this kind of forward-thinking educational model was a Silicon Valley thing. Let's dive in, because you're doing a lot of really cool things.

Rob Dickson: We're intentional here. We have what we call Future Ready Centers. We opened the first one about four years ago focused on advanced manufacturing — it doesn't look like a school at all. Kids learn how to build aircraft components. They're learning from Airbus and WSU Tech, not from K-12 teachers in a traditional classroom setting. We also have a BioMed center. And we just opened The Hack — the Hub for Advanced Computer Knowledge — in partnership with WSU Tech, which is part of Wichita State University. At The Hack, kids are learning cybersecurity and machine learning as extensions of computer science, and we're about to introduce data science as we work through the state approval process.

Our community partnerships with Wichita State and WSU Tech are central to all of this. Next week I'll be leading our summer STEM camp with 800 middle school kids — they'll learn CNC machining, work on wind resistance and car design through design thinking. Wichita is the air capital of the world, so there's a tremendous amount of manufacturing here, and those industry relationships create real opportunities for our kids.

Matthew Connor: That is so cool. What you're describing is essentially what people associate with Elon Musk's private school — learning by doing, multi-age environments, project-based learning — but happening at the public school level in Kansas. That's phenomenal. And it's what kids actually need, because sitting in rows of desks listening to a 45-minute lecture is genuinely hard even for adults. Tell me more about Creative Minds.

Rob Dickson: Creative Minds is the K through 6 micro school. Think of kids from kindergarten through sixth grade together in one room — we have two rooms right now and 130 kids on the wait list. The framework breaks down like this: learning by doing at the elementary level, skill discovery in middle school, skill development in high school. At the core, you're teaching kids to learn through creation rather than consumption. So much of the backlash around screen time today is really about consumption — and I think of Steve Jobs' quote about the bicycle being a technology. You can ride a bike, but the bicycle by itself is just metal. The student is the engine.

During COVID, over 90% of US schools went one-to-one with devices overnight. If you hadn't built the right digital literacy and citizenship foundation first, what you got was consumption, because that's the path of least resistance.

At Creative Minds, there's a theme each year that drives everything. This year it was animal conservation, last year food preservation — the kids did a dinner and a show. Every standard they're learning is taught through the lens of that project. There are no rows of desks. Kids work in a 2.5-hour instruction block and the rest of the day is project-based learning connecting those subjects through interdisciplinary activities. We also put real responsibility on the kids — things like hand-washing dishes instead of using paper cups. It sounds small, but it's part of building the right habits.

The reason this works is relevance. If I had to name the two biggest reasons kids aren't engaged today, it's distraction and lack of relevance. They don't see why they need to learn what they're being taught. When you frame everything around an end goal they have to build toward, that relevance clicks.

Matthew Connor: And is this the future of education?

Rob Dickson: I think it's an important aspect of it, but not a one-size-fits-all model. Different communities, different cultures — even across Wichita as we expand Creative Minds — there's a hyper-localization that happens. Some things that work here wouldn't transfer directly elsewhere. But it's a great testing ground for what the next step in education could look like and whether it can scale.

Matthew Connor: Now where does AI fit into all of this? Because the tension everyone's wrestling with is: how do you integrate AI into education, especially with younger kids, without having them outsource all their thinking to it?

Rob Dickson: I go back to where people come into it. I was in the Air Force in the 90s, then came into my first school district in the late 90s and brought Internet for the first time. So I have the compare-contrast of before and after the Internet in schools. I also have that same before-and-after perspective on AI personally.

Do I offload a lot of thinking to AI? For sure — that cognitive offload is necessary for me to get through the day. But there's a skill called productive struggle that young kids absolutely have to develop. You can't outsource understanding. AI can't understand something from your lens, your bias, your lived experience. Whatever domain of knowledge you need to internalize, you have to go through the productive struggle to build wisdom. When you're building AI agents — and we've built several here in Wichita Public Schools — you're deconstructing a task to its root level and it has to be highly verifiable. But if a task isn't verifiable, subjectiveness enters and you need wisdom to make that call. That wisdom only comes from having gone through the productive struggle in the first place.

For our teachers and educators, AI is genuinely amazing — creating more interactive lessons, helping with universal design for learning principles, meeting accessibility needs, differentiating for all kinds of students. But for students, you have to build the foundational skills first and present that productive struggle before you can meaningfully understand and evaluate AI outputs. Otherwise they'll take it for granted, and it won't be right 100% of the time.

Matthew Connor: And on the security side — because schools are a uniquely complicated environment. You've got staff, students, their data, privacy concerns, and you're trying to keep bad actors out, all at the same time. I love what machine learning-based AI is doing in security right now — products like Darktrace that give us a glimpse of the future. Machine-speed attacks are real, and humans simply can't compete at that speed. Having AI that sees something abnormal happen, stops it, and calls for a human to investigate — that's the right model. But for schools specifically, what are you looking at?

Rob Dickson: You need playbooks for both internal and external threats, because school districts are hybrid environments now. Twenty-seven years ago when I came into education, everything was on-premise. Today the blast radius is much wider.

One of the things we do that I'm really proud of is hiring students for cybersecurity work. Through our partnership with Wichita State's applied learning program, The Hack, and WSU Tech, I have student workers doing real security work. Right now I have eleven students refreshing 45,000 devices across the district this summer. One of them, Samantha, started as a part-time student worker and is now a full-time staff member. She creates playbooks, and those playbooks have been tremendously valuable. We use AI to help analyze large data sets — what would take hours manually, we can move through much faster. We run all of Microsoft's security products, and being able to analyze that data across multiple panes of glass and have some automated reactionary capability when you're not there is critical.

This past weekend we had an email triage situation we had to deal with — because threat actors know to hit on weekends and holidays, not during the school day. Those playbooks and that automated response capability made a real difference.

The social engineering dimension is also growing fast. I had a data analyst position open for about a month and received over 900 applicants. When you start going through them, a significant number aren't real people — they're attempts to get inside your system to access data. Using AI to help analyze applicant validity and flag those attempts has become a genuine part of our process.

Matthew Connor: That connects directly to something another guest brought up — the ghost student fraud at universities where bad actors apply, collect financial aid, and disappear. You're seeing the same social engineering dynamics playing out on your end with fake job applicants. And I think it just underscores that the bad actors will find the seam in any system. I am an optimist, though. I do think if we use AI on the defensive side with the same seriousness the bad guys are using it offensively, we can win this. Not easily, not immediately — but we can.

Rob Dickson: I'm glad you brought up the tabletop scenario angle, because I think one of the underrated powers of AI is memory and continuity. We've been using AI to build tabletop scenarios, and as you post results from those scenarios, it can take the next step: what does this look like escalated, what's the next layer of threat, what did we miss? That creates a continuous improvement cycle rather than "it's March, let's do our annual tabletop." It's a living posture rather than a checkbox.

Matthew Connor: That's such a good point. The ability to build on institutional knowledge over time rather than starting fresh every cycle is one of the things I think makes AI genuinely transformative in security. And I think the broader lesson applies to education too — social media arrived and we just threw kids in front of it without thinking through the consequences. Those were formative years that can't be undone. What you're doing in Wichita is a very different approach: thoughtful, intentional, with the outcomes clearly defined from the start. Learning through creation rather than consumption. I'd love to see more school districts doing this.

Rob Dickson: That's a testament to our superintendent, Kelly Bielefeld. He's willing to take real risks — starting a micro school that looks nothing like a traditional building, building Future Ready Centers that don't look like classrooms. He has tied these initiatives to both economic and community outcomes in ways that have given us the credibility and the relationships to keep pushing. And that's really the key: the relationships with WSU Tech, Wichita State, and local industries existed first. Without those, none of this happens.

Matthew Connor: What would you say to other CIOs and school leaders who want to follow your lead?

Rob Dickson: Build the relationships first. Everything we've done — the Future Ready Centers, Spate as the first immersive coding school in Kansas, Creative Minds operating outside a normal school day — none of it was possible without partnerships and trust built with WSU Tech, Wichita State, local industry, and our state Department of Education. When you can demonstrate that the outcome you're chasing is more than test scores — that it's the future economic health of your community and the readiness of your kids to contribute to it — those are powerful arguments. Start with the outcome you're trying to achieve, build those relationships around it, and work your way back from there.

Matthew Connor: Rob, I don't know if there could be a better note to end on. That was beautifully said. It's been amazing talking to you, and I genuinely hope more schools follow what you're building in Wichita. Before we go, can you tell everyone where they can find out more about you and Wichita Public Schools?

Rob Dickson: Sure. The district website is wichitapublicschools.org. Creative Minds is at wichitacreativeminds.org. And you can find me on X and LinkedIn — both at ShowMeRob. I'm originally from Missouri, so Show Me State — it fits.

Matthew Connor: Perfect. Rob, thanks again. Until next time.

Rob Dickson: Thank you.