Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 13, 1994 TAG: 9401140362
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: By PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PULASKI LENGTH: Medium
The board got the second of two reports from staff members on the proposed plan Wednesday morning. Superintendent Bill Asbury said school officials will have to confer with the Board of Supervisors on possible avenues to fund it.
``There's not any question about what we need to do. The question is how to do it,'' he said. ``I don't see how we can afford not to want it.''
He said employers now seek graduates who can use computers and have been trained in critical thinking skills. ``The only way we can achieve this realistically in mass public education is technology. . . . We're going to have to find a way.''
He said teaching can be greatly enhanced through technology.
The plan envisions buying a laptop computer for every 10 teachers, although the board also discussed the possibility of paying a share for teachers who buy their own. There is a need for teachers to have compatible computers.
Joy Colbert, the school system's director of research development and technology, said business and industry are finding they must invest 6 percent or more of their annual budgets in technology ``just to stay alive. ... We just find that everything we're asking for in the technology report is really kind of [a] minimum.''
The $500,000 would be about 2 percent of the school budget. Asbury said some alternate means of funding might have to be considered, ``because I don't see where we can bite off $500,000'' from the regular budget each year.
Pulaski County citizens approved a $2 million bond issue several years ago to equip every school with computers.
But those computers need upgrading. They are running out of memory and cannot use much of the new software that is now available. And there are only enough computers for students to average 20 minutes a week with them.
Pulaski County High School, for example, has a few hundred computers but 1,800 students, Colbert noted. The school system is nowhere near having computer teaching stations in every classroom.
``It was a very needed and very central issue and it was wonderful that the public backed it,'' Jim Sandidge said of the bond issue. ``But it was based on 1989 technology.''
Sandidge said the purpose for which students use computers is also changing. ``What we got in the bond issue was basically remediation software,'' he said. ``But everything has become so much more sophisticated since 1989.''
``It opened the door,'' Colbert said. ``Now we've got to go in the room. . . . It's not just that technology is something that's nice for us to have. It changes the way we do business.''
Teachers can prepare lessons using other technological equipment, from compact disks to television, on their own computers if they have access to them. The one laptop computer per 10 teachers would at least make a minimum number available to be checked out.
by CNB