In a move to simplify the already stressful process of applying to colleges, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and the Illinois Board of Higher Education (IBHE) have added all of the state’s public universities onto the Common App platform.

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont and the Connecticut State Department of Education are launching a new initiative to give high school students a voice in how more than $1.5 million in American Rescue Plan Elementary and Secondary Schools Emergency Relief (ARP ESSER) funds are spent.

Data is one of the most important tools in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. Citizens need accurate data to understand the virus and access vaccinations while public health officials need up-to-date information to track COVID-19 and evaluate immunization effectiveness. MeriTalk spoke with Jim Daniel, who leads state and local public health for Amazon Web Services (AWS), to learn how access to public health data has improved and how it may change in the future.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced most state and local governments (SLGs) to undergo rapid modernization. For many, modernization has meant adopting a new suite of software services to meet citizen needs as the government shifted to remote work and digital service delivery.

In a bid to improve the user experience, reduce risks, and cut data processing time, the Los Angeles County Office of the Assessor announced that it has migrated its Assessor operations from a paper-based, legacy mainframe environment to the cloud.

A new report from Verizon Frontline found that 93 percent of first responders believe intergovernmental coordination is critical when responding to an emergency and 80 percent believe that interoperability – defined as the ability to communicate across agencies regardless of network or device – is urgently needed.

Maryland’s COVID-19 vaccine call center, created in February of this year, has now helped scheduled more than 460,000 vaccination appointments and made more than 11 million outreach calls to Marylanders.

Stanford University announced a new initiative that seeks to leverage the school’s technological capabilities to reach students who have historically been underserved by higher education.

What does technology really cost – and perhaps an even more critical question – how do you fund its acquisition?

Federal and state CIOs shared pandemic lessons and their thinking about return-to-office strategies during an October 19 panel discussion at the Dell Technologies Forum online event.