Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, October 15, 1994 TAG: 9410180081
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PULASKI LENGTH: Medium
A committee established to set goals for the system's five-year technology plan is recommending that the School Board include an amount equal to 5 percent of the total school expenditures for 1995-96 specifically for technology.
Total expenditures for this school year are more than $23.6 million. If the technology line item had been part of this year's budget, it would have amounted to more than $1.1 million.
Walt Shannon, the school system's business manager, estimated that technology costs amount to less than 1 percent of the school budget now.
Isabel Berney, the system's research, media and technology director, said the 5 percent recommendation came from a committee that included members from outside the school system. ``Things become obsolete now in less than five months,'' she told the School Board Thursday night.
Pulaski County voters approved a $2 million bond issue four years ago to put computers in classrooms at every school. The technology plan calls for connecting all schools to each other and to ``information highways'' accessible by computer.
This is already being done at the math, science and technology demonstration school within Dublin Elementary School, in conjunction with the Southwest Virginia Governor's School. The Governor's School has already linked its computer system to Pulaski County High School, and has secured a National Aeronautics and Space Administration grant to link schools from other localities to the information highway.
Berney said the students in the demonstration school are already using computers to communicate with students all over the country. They have distributed information, including photographs, of D.C. Wysor Observatory located on the school grounds to schools nationwide.
Students for the school were chosen to reflect the general population of the school.
The progress of demonstration school students will be tracked in later years to see if the educational techniques used prepare them to perform better.
But Berney said parents seem pleased with how their children are showing interest in so many things outside the classroom, ranging from pumpkin patches to airplanes. She said the children say things like, ``School is fun. We're not even studying anything.'' Actually, she said, they are studying many things but in an integrated way that puts science, math, art, language and other subjects into a seamless curriculum.
``We are using a textbook, but the children are reading all kinds of things,'' she said.
Another educational initiative is the Critical Years/Critical Skills program, set up to make sure students in lower grades master skills at one level before moving on to the next. Pam Simpson, coordinator of curriculum and instruction, told the School Board that student assessments from kindergarten to second grade have been completed.
``What we're focusing on now is what we're going to do with the information,'' she said, but already teachers are saying that the data is letting them know more about their students than they ever have.
``We're not naive enough to assume that this doesn't have bugs in it, so we're trying to fix the airplane at the same time while we're flying the airplane,'' she said. ``I'm getting very positive feedback.''
``Fixing the problem early is what this is all about,'' Superintendent Bill Asbury told the board, ``and I think you're going to see some startling results over the next few years.''
About 60 teachers have signed up to buy their own laptop computers under a payroll deduction plan set up by county school officials, he reported.
by CNB