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

DATE: THURSDAY, September 7, 1995                   TAG: 9509070038
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-2   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: DUBLIN                                LENGTH: Medium

GOVERNOR'S SCHOOL HIRES DIRECTOR FOR REGIONAL COMPUTER NETWORK|

Wenrich, taking a leave of absence from the Pulaski County school system for advanced degree studies, worked most recently as one of the coordinators of the math and science technology demonstration school within Dublin Elementary School.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is providing more than $50,000 in funding for the project, mainly for equipment. The Governor's School staff has been working for more than a year to get the NASA grant for a program to give it and other schools access to the information superhighway.

The project is modeled on another NASA-sponsored network at the New Horizons Governor's School at Hampton. The network there is known as HorizonNet; the one being established in Southwest Virginia will be called MountainNet.

A high-speed telephone line will link the Governor's School with the Internet, and other lines will gradually link this hub with other schools. The schools to be tied into the system during the 1995-96 year are Pulaski County High School, Dublin Elementary School, Fort Chiswell High School and Giles High School.

Some of those school systems also received NASA start-up grants. The cost for a school to install a server for up to 250 work stations is about $10,000, plus the cost of telephone line access.

"We're starting out slowly. That's by design," Wenrich told the Governor's School board Tuesday. "Training is going to be a big part of this."

The Governor's School will train teachers, administrators and principals on the equipment in the weeks ahead.

Margaret "Pat" Duncan, the Governor's School director, said she hoped to have 12 schools on the system over time. She said North Carolina has adopted the same kind of Internet access program as that offered through NASA, and she thought Virginia should adopt it in place of the Virginia PEN network for schools.

"It's still available, but it's slow, and it's not on after 7 p.m.," she said. Virginia PEN also has many users and is difficult to access. "That's why we want to go to something faster," she said.

Bluefield College officials had read newspaper articles on the school's Internet initiative, and expressed interest in using its facilities for adult classes on advanced computers.

"It was extremely easy for us to get caught up in your enthusiasm," Robert Lowery, Bluefield's director of adult and continuing education, said in a letter to Duncan following a visit to the school. "We knew almost immediately that the Southwest Virginia Governor's School would be the type facility conducive to our classes."

In other business, the board learned that faculty member Rick Fisher had been part of a team which had developed a new evaluation plan for judging math and statistics papers in advanced student work. He was recently notified that the Virginia Junior Academy of Sciences adopted the rubric to use in its judging.

The Governor's School has 93 students this year, 46 juniors and 47 seniors, commuting for a half-day of advanced classes from their home schools.