The Sequoia Union High School District spends significant amounts of time protecting the District's digital assets. Your password is the first level of protection for assuring the integrity of your computing activity and preventing others from accessing your computer account for disruptive, offensive, or illegal activities. Passwords address our primary concern: maintaining the integrity of your account and computer while protecting the District's resources, as well as you, from abuse.

Note: This information is important for faculty and students/parents who are accessing resources such as Communicda.

To protect both the District's interests and your personal information (i.e. portal access, e-mail, and access to District resources such as our file and database servers), we have implemented guidelines for choosing secure passwords within our network:

• Your password must be 7 to 14 characters in length (8 to 64 characters for Communicado). Please note that some older Macintosh computers may only handle up to 8 character passwords.
• It must not be a word that appears in any common language dictionary, particularly English or Spanish.
• It must not be a word followed or preceded by other characters. Passwords such as 1check2 or 55stu20 are not valid, and are certainly insecure.
• Your passwords for systems that store confidential and/or classified information such as the SIS or Financials should be DIFFERENT than the ones that you use to access general network resources.

We want your experience to be a pleasant one when using Technology and Information Service's systems. Therefore, we suggest that you create a password that is easy for you to use and remember but difficult for a malicious user or password cracking program to guess. Do not choose passwords that have any personal reference to yourself; for example, your nickname, a social security or employee/student ID# or a hobby. We suggest the following techniques:

• Choose a line from a song or poem, and use the first letter of each word. For example, "Four Score and Seven Years Ago Today" becomes "4s&7YAT".
  
  
• Choose two short words and concatenate them together with a punctuation character between them, such as: "1americ8n;p1e", "70s+s0ngs", "1c0ol_cA^t".

In order to pre-empt any long-term attacks against your account, you should change your password every 60 days. Changing your password on our network is easy and convenient - take advantage.