Old Equipment Keeping Schools From Jumping On The Internet

Whirring and humming to itself, teacher Jan Steele’s computer was trying to pull an elephant-sized ball of electronically scrambled words and pictures off the Internet and through a phone line as wide as a needle.

Making it worse was the turtle speed of the computer - a 286 that was state-of-the-art five years ago, but is now a relic.

After waiting almost 15 minutes, students in Steele’s second-grade class at Lake Spokane Elementary marveled at on-line biographies of Italian artists Mogliani and da Vinci not available in any of the school’s encyclopedias - then had to move along to the next lesson.

“I’d kill for four more megas of RAM and a color printer that could work,” said Steele in techno-speak, sighing.

Steele’s dilemma is repeated in the small, rural districts across north Spokane County.

Educators itching to explore new possibilities of educating with the Internet have been helped by high-tech companies that readily give away computers, on-line services and software to schools.

Spokane Internet provider Jim Moody has promised free, unlimited on-line access for any classroom in the Nine Mile Falls School District that has a computer, modem and phone line. Riverside and Chattaroy residents have given local schools computers. Another company gave Deer Park School District a deal on a one-gigabyte computer to act as a hub for a network.

But the school districts are having a hard time using the gifts, mostly because of schools’ old communication systems built to be little more than intercoms. Phone lines are relatively cheap, but most of the schools in those districts have old wiring systems that cannot handle extra phone lines for computers. Renovations, in some cases, would require serious construction.

Voters in Nine Mile Falls turned down a special levy in 1994 that would have done that and bought new computers.

Neither Nine Mile Falls, Deer Park nor Riverside school districts are pursuing special technology levies, although all three need one.

Deer Park Junior High School teacher Dan Huffman got a deal on a large computer hard drive that could be a hub, or a server, for a school and community network. But adding multiple phone connections to the server will require a major overhaul of the school’s communication backbone.

And the Riverside School District is considering spending $10,000 to bring the junior high school phone lines into the fiber-optic age, said administrator Terry Weinmann.

Steele’s room does not have an Internet-ready phone line, so she uses the library’s line.

Adding a line to her room is expensive and logistically difficult, said Steele, a member of the district’s technology committee.

“That’s what’s so ironic - Jim (Moody) has given us all this free service, but we can’t get anyone on-line because we don’t have the phone lines,” said Steele, who asked Moody for the free service.

Committees have been formed to study solutions to both the lack of regular and modem phone lines, said district administrator Jaime Seaburg.

“It is a familiar theme in our state and in several states throughout the West,” said David Kennedy, the state director of educational technology. “We are very concerned about rural schools who don’t have the financial base to mount this kind of effort.”

, DataTimes