Students Keep Schools Clicking Idaho Districts Draw On Tech-Savvy Kids To Run Computer Systems

It’s about 9:30 a.m. and high school senior Nathan Zemke is surrounded by computer innards.

The gutted cadavers of some outmoded 486s and 386s sit at his feet. A pile of disks and hard drives surrounds his desk in the school’s computer lab. A few wire-covered gizmos circle the handmade sign behind him that says:

“Hello, I’m Nathan, your computer leader.”

Zemke, 17, was hired by the Post Falls School District this year to help set up the district’s computer network, install software and exterminate computer bugs from Post Falls schools.

“He’s pretty amazing. I learned a lot from him,” said Jon Wilkerson, technology coordinator for the Post Falls School District. “He’s run cable. He’s administered the network. He’s built computers. Just about anything.”

With more computers in schools than ever and a limited number of people to maintain them, school administrators in North Idaho and around the country are taking advantage of their tech-savvy students to fill those posts.

Most are students raised on gigabytes and RAM, who say they picked up their computer know-how not by books or classes but by trial and error.

It’s the ‘90s version of the audiovisual club, and students and administrators say both sides benefit: Cash-strapped schools get inexpensive labor and students get some hands-on experience in the computer field.

At Priest River Lamanna High School, the applied computer technicians class was almost canceled this year because there was no instructor.

So the school librarian volunteered to teach it.

“That class was too important to let drop,” said librarian Susan Easley, who leads a class of six students who repair old computers and wire the school’s computer network. “We needed that resource.”

Easley draws up work orders for the students, who are then dispatched to other Bonner County schools to fix computer problems.

In Kellogg, just about all of the district’s computer network was installed by students, said Steve Knox, the district’s technology coordinator. Some districts, like those in Spokane, don’t give students such unlimited access to the network for security reasons.

“You name it,” Knox said. “They act as network administrators. They install software. Right now they’re doing hardware repair. We’ve even had them crawl through various parts of the building that were seemingly inaccessible.”

In Washington, all of the District 81 high schools offer some kind of technical assistants program in which students learn basic troubleshooting, software installation and maintenance, and hardware repairs, said Kevin Foster, a technology resource facilitator for the district’s secondary schools.

Similar programs are offered at high schools in Coeur d’Alene.

In Spokane, the techies are also taught customer service - how not to act like know-it-alls with folks less computer literate than themselves, Foster said.

“Be polite,” he tells students often charged with teaching their teachers. “What you’re trying to do is make your customers more comfortable rather than less comfortable.”

Morgan Ellis, 17, a senior at Kellogg High School, said he’s gotten used to his teachers asking for computer help.

“It’s always just sort of been the role,” Ellis said. “The kids always know what’s going on with computers and the adults always ask for help. And now I’m getting credits for it.”

Girls are a rarity in the male-dominated technology classes, and 17-year-old Erica Schreiber, a Kellogg High School senior, said she’s not sure why.

Schreiber said she got teased by the six boys in her class at first, but that things are “pretty cool” now.

“There’s not really a whole lot of girls interested in it,” she said.

But Schreiber, who plans on attending North Idaho College next fall, said the class is perfect for her, because she wants to be a computer technician.

And with J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation grants pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars in computer equipment into Idaho schools, the student computer technicians will become even more useful, Knox said.

“If it weren’t for the students that I will have trained when that stuff comes, I would be between a rock and a hard spot,” he said. “We’re going to be moving computers around. They’ll have to set up new computers.”

Zemke, the Post Falls High School computer guru, would like to be a technology trainer for a company after attending Eastern Washington University.

Until then, he’ll continue to spend between 10 and 18 hours a week making a little more than minimum wage as Mr. Fix-it in the high school computer lab. The district has two full-time technicians, plus Zemke, who repair 95 percent of the computers. Other work is contracted out for about $45 to $60 an hour, Wilkerson said.

On a recent school day, Zemke spent several hours installing office software on a new hard drive for one of the school’s secretaries.

His work was interrupted when a student across the room called out, “Why won’t this save?”

“Oh, that’s not a problem,” Zemke said, and sat down at the keyboard.