K12 Federation Launches Educational Cooperative

K12 Federation has initiated a nationwide launch of its educational cooperative that provides technology services for the K-12 education community, including identity, interoperability, security and other collaborative solutions.

K12 Federation brings together dozens of technology leaders from states representing over 4 million students, fostering collaboration and providing K12 operators and districts around the country with services and solutions into federated identity management, cybersecurity and access to products and services within an interoperational buying cooperative, according to the group.

The K12 Federation began as a community of K12 operators – large school district, purchasing cooperatives for various products and services and state-level providers who reportedly realized they were working together in pursuit of goals within the same space. By coming together, they reportedly saw that they could build great tools and optimize the use of resources and public spending through pooled efforts and a centralized source for acquiring technology.

K12 Federation reportedly grew from the success of IlliniCloud, a nonprofit tech cooperative of school districts across the country that provides scalable computing resources and state-of-the-art IT resources. IlliniCloud helps members procure and implement physical and cloud infrastructure including storage, recovery and federated identity services that connect and automate data transfer across schools, state reporting agencies and service providers, and allows students, teachers and all authorized personnel to log in to centralized portals designed for their administrative and curriculum needs. All current IlliniCloud products and services are available nationwide through the K12 Federation.

K12 Federation was founded by operators across four states: Illinois, Nebraska, Nevada and New York.  New operators are welcome.

For more information, visit K12 Federation.

Sources: Press materials received from the company.