Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 11, 1992                   TAG: 9203110123
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-8   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER
DATELINE: DUBLIN                                LENGTH: Medium

HOMEWORK LINE A BIGGER HIT THAN EXPECTED

The idea was that daily updates from all teachers of each student would come on line for first-year students first. Then, over the next several days, sophomores, juniors and seniors would be added in that order.

"So much for the theory. Everybody jumped the gun," Principal Tom DeBolt told the school's PTA Monday night. "Before we knew it, we were over 1,000 calls a night."

The system has been in place about a week and a half but, DeBolt said, the first week was supposed to be practice.

Phil Vickers, who handles the school's computerized communications, has determined that some callers had been hanging up before all the messages were played. Most of those probably came from students, rather than parents, just checking the system out of curiosity, DeBolt said.

Now there has been a decline in calls from students and an increase in those from parents, DeBolt said.

The number of daily callers has settled back to about 800.

"We're able to handle that quite nicely," he said. "Most people are not getting a busy signal."

But he expects the daily numbers to drop to perhaps 500 as the novelty wears off. That would still be almost a third of the homes of the school's 1,676 students.

Compare that, he suggested, to the average of 1.4 parent contacts a week by each teacher. It means there were more parent contacts in two days with the communications system than there would be all year without it.

The system allows callers to punch in a four-digit number for a particular student and get messages about 45 seconds long from each of that student's teachers on what was covered in class that day and what the homework assignments are.

It is one of about a dozen high school communications systems of this kind in the nation. The idea is to involve parents in the student's school experience and, through them, improve homework completions, learning and scholastic achievement.

"What we want to be is just darned helpful," DeBolt said.

The PTA, organized during the current school year, spent about $300 to publicize the system to parents.

PTA President Howard Sadler urged members to recruit more parents to take part in the new organization. "The Cougar Information Network is wonderful, but we've got to have face-to-face contact," he said.

The PTA will elect officers for the 1992-93 year at its April 6 meeting.