ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, April 19, 1997 TAG: 9704210052
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
The administration says it wants to help wire every U.S. classroom and library to the Internet by 2000.
Some houses in San Elizario, Texas, lack running water and electricity. Volunteers, however, have wired schools in the border community for the Internet.
Because of that connection, students in the impoverished rural area can learn about planets or the latest space mission in a flash, or find electronic pen pals in Canada or Japan.
Teen-agers in San Elizario can also get a chuckle from the Beavis picture on their high school page, or visit the Doors site, where if you look at a staring Jim Morrison long enough, the long-dead rock star blinks.
``Just because we were poor, we were not going to lower our expectations,'' said Maria Pacheco, the school technology coordinator, who with 50 volunteers last October, strung cable through 120 classrooms in one day.
Today - NetDay - that kind of volunteer effort repeats itself around the country, as parents, teachers, corporate officials, communications workers and retirees run high-capacity cable through classrooms.
Although there's a world of information out there, it can take miles of cable to bring the data from the outside phone line to the classroom. The research firm Market Data Retrieval estimates that 27,000 to 40,000 schools use the Internet - about one-third to one-half of public schools.
But other surveys indicate that the connection reaches less than 10 percent of the classrooms, computer labs and libraries where students actually sit.
The founders of NetDay came across that reality when high-tech California wanted to wire its schools. The lowest estimate was $1 billion for labor and cable.
Two volunteers recruited others from high-tech companies in the state, and made a day of it March 6, 1996. The idea caught on, with encouragement from President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, who plan to take part in today's activities.
Other states held similar events last fall. Organizers estimate that last year, 250,000 volunteers in 40 states wired more than 50,000 classrooms.
Some states, meanwhile, have scheduled their own Internet days independent of Saturday, and some telephone companies have launched their own wiring campaigns.
The administration says it wants to help wire every American classroom and library to the Internet by 2000: Its budget request seeks $2 billion over the next five years to buy classroom computers, provide Internet access and train teachers to use it.
Access brings a range of materials to students, including NASA, National Geographic, Public Broadcasting Service, Scholastic Network and America Online Education, all cited by educators as top resources.
But some critics question whether people are blindly rushing to put schools on the so-called information superhighway.
``People have been become fixated on the white line down the middle without going beyond that and saying, `Are we actually achieving results?''' said William Rukeyser of Learning in the Real World, a Woodland, Calif., group that wants such a closer examination before more public money is spent.
The group worries how much time kids will gobble up by simply playing - checking out the Jim Morrison site, for example. There also are worries that attention spans will be further eroded by the quick pace of information.
But Sun MicroSystems scientist John Gage, a NetDay co-founder, said schools that aren't linked deprive children of the real-world connections that their parents often have, in a workplace increasingly dominated by whiz-bang communications.
``Suddenly a kid can be part of the NASA launch,'' he said. ``He's looking at the real telemetry from the real rocket.
``Suddenly, from a classroom, you're part of the grownup world and your seeing what they're doing.''
NetDay can be reached at http://www.netday.org. Faxed information is available by dialing 1-800-556-3896.
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