Access To Learning At The Spokane Skills Center, Teacher Uses A Bar-Code To Track Student Attendance, Progress

Teacher Terri Haworth oversees a futuristic classroom where students slide ID badges through a scanner when they arrive.

In her brave new classroom at the Spokane Skills Center, Haworth tracks student attendance and skills with a bar-code system.

The same technology that reads supermarket prices on cans of peas helps her stay organized while her students check off hundreds of graphics and printing skills.

Bar-code technology will be used in more schools, even elementary schools, predicted Robert Lehr, president of Diploma Technologies Inc., Kirkland, Wash., one company that writes and markets educational bar-code software.

That shouldn’t make people nervous about impersonal technology getting in the way of the student-teacher relationship, he said.

“It’s a simple recording device, like a calculator. Those who are comfortable with technology will be comfortable with it. Those who aren’t will have to catch up with the times.”

For now, technical programs in community colleges and high schools are the biggest market. The systems sell for between $1,000 to $3,600 per classroom.

“What students really like about it is it gives them more teacher-student contact time,” said Nolan Koreski, who teaches recreational vehicle repair at Lake Washington Technical College in Kirkland. “They also have ready access to how fast and how they’re progressing.”

Muriel Tingley, president of the conservative Washington Coalition for Academic Excellence, a group that researches and lobbies against education reform, fears the tracking system could violate students’ privacy, especially if the files contain Social Security numbers as Haworth’s do.

“How is it secured? Who has access to it?” asked Tingley.

Haworth countered that she has the only access to the system, which is protected with a password. Students give their Social Security numbers voluntarily, in case they get a paid internship at an area business.

At the Spokane Skills Center in Hillyard where students from area high schools come for job training, Haworth’s students move from project to project independently.

Haworth roams the room helping them. When students complete an assignment, they bring it to her for approval.

Ferris High senior Ezra Kinlow, 17, showed Haworth an example of his work with a stapling machine called the stitcher.

Haworth pointed her scanner at Kinlow’s badge and scanned his ID number. Then she scanned another bar code for the assignment and another for the level of skill she saw in the work.

Later, Haworth moved the information into her desktop computer by pushing a few buttons.

Kinlow may someday show his file to employers as he hunts for a job.

Washington’s education reform law requires public schools by the year 2000 to track student performance on various learning goals.

As that happens, more teachers may seek high-tech solutions for the “management nightmare” of that type of intensive tracking, said Bill Olfert, Spokane Skills Center director.

Olfert said he hopes every teacher at the skills center will use the bar-code system by next fall. He will ask the Legislature for $28,000 to buy the software and scanners.

“We’re using technology that’s been around 100 years,” Olfert said. “Why is that acceptable?”

Some of Haworth’s students joke about bar codes.

“You want to know what I think of this? It’s the mark of the beast,” deadpanned Mead High student Malia Johnson referring to apocalyptic predictions in the biblical book of Revelations that “the beast’s” followers will be marked with the number 666.

Most students see advantages.

“It’s all on file and if you need something it’s right there,” said student Scott Barfield, a senior at University High in Central Valley School District who has an internship lined up at a graphics company.

For Haworth, the system makes record keeping easier.

Her graphics program recently received certification from a national printing industries group, which means her students need to master long lists of skills.

“I did it the first year on paper and it made me nuts,” she said.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo