Hemet Unified School District
Contributed

On Jan. 23, students enrolled in cybersecurity at Hemet High School (HHS) finished in the gold and silver tiers at the Air Force Association’s CyberPatriot state competition. Over 3,000 students from across the nation competed in CyberPatriot, the National Youth Cyber Education Program created by the Air Force Association to inspire K-12 students toward careers in cybersecurity or other science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines.
During the competition, HHS students were grouped into two teams, The Cybears and the Stop Cyber Boolean. Both teams were sent to virtual breakout rooms where they were tasked with identifying and fixing vulnerabilities in Windows, Windows Server, and Ubuntu or Debian images. The images were self-graded, alerting students each time they did something right or wrong. As a part of the competition, students also completed a packet tracing exercise and quiz that was scored by Cisco. The Cybears team finished in the gold tier and included students Nahum Pina, James Simon, Salem Walsh and Miranda Martinez. Stop Cyber Boolean finished in the silver tier and included students Mckenna Galetta, Robert Novarro, Andrew Bonano, Trevor Castetter, Conner Lugo and Chayton Helms.
“Students prepared by meeting Thursday mornings, studying on their own, and giving up six hours every Saturday of practice and competition! It has been a great extracurricular activity during these challenging times,” stated HHS’s cybersecurity instructor and club coach, James Walsh.
The competition gave the students an opportunity to test the skills they have been learning in class and participate in an activity that was both engaging and relevant. The job outlook for careers in cybersecurity remains high, with California market and labor statistics trends showing a 28.4% job growth for information security analysts through 2026.