RBR’s Technology Students Prevail Despite Superstorm Sandy

Red Bank Regional (RBR) 2013 graduates Ryan McVeety, Little Silver, and Michael Terpak, Union Beach, recently returned from Anaheim, California, finishing first and eighth, respectively, in the Future Business Leaders Association’s national competition. The two RBR Academy of Information Technology (AOIT) students were also part of the RBR CyberTech team that won the Air Force Association’s CyberPatriot State Championship with fellow students Richard Connors, Neptune City, Jeremy Comeo, Union Beach, Austin Ostrander, Millstone Township, and Alec Jasanovsky, Neptune City.  This added to several other victories during the school year, including top trophies in the NYU-Poly CSAW Forensics national competition and first and fourth place finishes in the first NJ Governor’s Cyber Challenge.

Although RBR’s IT students have become accustomed to bringing home many trophies for their IT and cyber security prowess, it was hardly imaginable this year could be such a success due to its very rocky start.

Their teacher, Mandy Galante explains:  “In early October 2012 the team was gearing up for Round 1 of the CyberPatriot cyber defense competition, one of the most challenging and prestigious cyber events of the year.   The team was talented, motivated and had been practicing hard to prepare.  Round 1 should have been a do-able challenge for this group, maybe not a layup, but nothing to stress out over either.

But Team RBR not only stressed out during Round 1, it hit a wall. The reason: Hurricane Sandy. The huge storm walloped New Jersey on October 29th, a mere 18 days before Round 1. The communities that make up RBR were smack in her path. No power for 13 straight days, no heat and, for many students in our district, no home. Everyone came through the storm safely but the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy was grueling. Two of our team members live in Union Beach and were dealing with the fact that their town was almost wiped off the map. School was closed for two straight weeks so instead of practicing security hardening, we were tearing water soaked debris out of our neighbor’s homes.

Our “Jersey Strong” school community rallied to recover. We held clothing drives, we adopted families for the holidays, we spent weekends serving hot meals, and we wrote grants to replace student computers. Finally the lights, heat and Internet came back on and we were grateful to return to the classroom. Team RBR was confident that Sandy was just a speed bump that wouldn’t really impact their competitive ability.

We were wrong. Sandy exacted a huge toll on our team members, in terms of both their training and their stress levels. During the first round, the students did not work as a team; no one person can handle this competition alone. They forgot to stick to their plan and document their steps, so they kept trying to fix things that had already been fixed. Most importantly, they forgot to have fun. They just had too many other things on their minds. And so, Team RBR went home with a score of 80% in a challenge on which they could have absolutely achieved a perfect score.

When the team members came to the next practice, I was happy to see that they had returned to their good humor and were looking at Round 1 as a lesson learned. As we learned from Hurricane Sandy, bad stuff can happen even when you are strong and prepared. And like they did during the aftermath of the storm, our team had the right attitude to move forward. They recovered from their disappointment and put their focus into preparing for the next challenge.  Undoubtedly the team with the most heart, Team RBR ended the year with a trophy case full of accomplishments.”