| Today's News |
| Sports |
| Entertainment |
| Technology |
| Live Views |
| Traffic |
| Weather |
| Health |
| Business |
| Bay Area Travel |
| Columnists |
| Classifieds |
| Conferences |
| Search |
| Index |
|
| ||
| Push On to Get Home
Computers to Poor Students Meredith May, Chronicle Staff Writer |
Tuesday, January 18, 2000
 | |
|
| ||
|
Regional -- While other children her age are pulling down history facts from the Internet and writing essays in Microsoft Word, Zakie Render has been online only a few times and does her homework using pencil and paper. The 13-year-old Richmond girl cannot get regular access to the few terminals in her middle-school classes, and her family cannot afford one for home. ``The other kids tease us and stuff, call us poor, because we don't have computers at home,'' said Zakie, who says she is one of the two or three kids in her class of 30 who still handwrite their reports. Forty percent of American households now have computers, but only 8 percent of poor families do, according to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. The gap between the technological haves and have nots is actually widening, and while schools try to even the score, the kids who need PC access most attend the least-equipped schools. Despite the doubling of the number of computers in schools nationwide in the past five years and Gov. Gray Davis' pledge to spend $200 million on still more computers for California classrooms, computers are still a rarity for many kids in the Bay Area and across the country. The result is a digital divide among schoolchildren that worries teachers, employers and technology experts. While their more affluent peers whiz forward into a technological world of international e-pals and personal Web pages, children from the poorest families are being left to do their homework with a No. 2 pencil and an encyclopedia from the library. They could be doomed to second-class status in the Information Age, according to state and federal experts. ``Some kids are plugged-in and have access to information from home whenever they need it. Others have never sent an e-mail,'' said Paul Lamb, director of Street Tech in Alameda, which helps low-income teenagers tap into technology. Wealthy Americans are 20 times more likely to own a computer than low-income families, according to the 1998 report, ``Falling Through the Net: Defining the Digital Divide,'' written by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Only 8 percent of families earning less than $10,000 a year have PCs, and within that group, only 3 percent have an Internet connection, the report finds. One emerging solution for low- income kids in the Bay Area and nationwide is to get special grants of public money or private donations to send kids home with computers. -- Christopher Columbus School in New Jersey was able to cobble up enough grants to outfit every middle-school child with a laptop, and teachers watched attendance and test scores rise. The school turned itself around and avoided a state takeover in 1995 by pursuing technology, and it is now an often-cited example among computer advocates. -- In East Palo Alto, Edison McNair Academy, a charter school, is sending an iMac desktop computer home with every child in the fourth through eighth grades. The free computers also allow parents to stay in touch with their children's teachers via e-mail, to check homework assignments and to find learning games online. The funding comes from Gap founder Don Fisher. -- In the Oakland schools, there are plans to use two federal grants totaling $24 million over the next five years to send every high school student and 3,500 seventh-graders home with an Internet-ready computer. ``For the last decade, business and government were focused on getting computers into schools, but now people are starting to realize that what really divides kids academically is whether they have a computer at home,'' said Peter Hutcher, coordinator of instructional technology for the Oakland schools. In Richmond, Leonard McNeil, who runs a small computer center at the Richmond housing project where Zakie and her three cousins come for help, has raised about $300,000 to build a new multimedia center with a lab of 20 networked computers in the subsidized housing complex. Part of the money came from the U.S. Department of Education, which doled out $10 million last year to narrow the digital divide with 40 computer centers in low-income neighborhoods. McNeil dreams of having the computer capabilities of Berkeley's Longfellow Arts and Technology Magnet Middle School. The school has the financial backing of 15 multimedia companies, as well as the city, state and federal governments, to create a school that is technologically tops in California. With 200 computers for 392 students, there are no lines to log on at Longfellow. The school has an Internet radio station and classes in programming, Web site design, computerized music composition and 3-D animation. Technology coordinator Nancy Elnor's students write computer programs and design Web pages for the Berkeley Symphony and the Coast Guard. Students regularly check their homework assignments on the school's Web page and send e-mail to their teachers. Student Walter Adachi, 12, who helped design Longfellow's school home page, already has his own tech title: director of graphics integration. He learned HTML computer language by the sixth grade and recently linked a math game he created, using JavaScript, with the school's Web site. On Saturdays, he and several classmates take special computer programming classes at school that are given by the national manager of systems engineering for Sun Microsystems. Longfellow, however, is worlds away from the typical California classroom. California's public schools rank dead last in student-per-computer ratio, according to Market Data Research of Connecticut, which conducts an annual survey of computer access in 87,000 public schools nationwide. On average, eight California kids must jostle for one computer, while the national average is five. If it is a computer with an Internet connection, 19 California kids must share it, compared with 13 nationwide, state officials say. For the Richmond cousins, Portola Middle School in El Cerrito is not really a place to learn how to use the Internet. The terminals at their middle school are either set aside for the computer class, for teachers or have a line of kids waiting to use them. The girls, who are bused to El Cerrito because there is no middle school in the Richmond flatlands, also cannot stick around after school because they would miss the bus that takes them back to their neighborhood. ``I'm worried I'm gonna flunk because I can't get the information the other kids can,'' said Alexis Lee, 14, one of the cousins. ``We have to use the dictionary or books at the library that have the wrong numbers for population and agriculture.'' Thirteen-year-old Leah Lane switched from an Oakland middle school to Berkeley's Longfellow last fall, after her parents worried the information superhighway was bypassing their daughter. ``The computer room at my Oakland school didn't have any printers and none of the computers were connected to the Internet,'' Leah said. ``There were four computers with Internet in the library, but the library was never open after school.'' Brian Madej, a sixth-grader at Edison McNair Academy in East Palo Alto, will soon get his own iMac to take home. About 100 families at the school will get iMacs this year. ``I feel lucky now,'' said Brian, who uses school equipment to videotape the school's daily news show and to feed it into the Edison McNair intranet Web page. He edits the tape and adds special effects on the computer. Before the for-profit Edison Schools corporation took over his school in 1998, he waited for hours for a 30-minute turn at the local library computer. Now his school has a lab with 32 networked computers, plus clusters of four networked computers in every classroom. ``It's hard not having a computer because the other kids brag about the programs they have,'' he said. ``And they are probably learning more than me.'' A 3.4 magnitude earthquake rumbled through San Jose yesterday, rattling a few windows but causing no damage, officials reported. The temblor hit at 3:32 p.m. on the Calaveras Fault, which is on the same system as the Hayward Fault. The epicenter was nine miles north- northeast of City Hall, and the quake was felt up to five miles away, said Pat Jorgenson, a U.S. Geological Survey spokeswoman. ``It's a fairly typical quake for that fault,'' she said. ``We have several in a year's time of that magnitude on that part of the Calaveras.'' The temblor was followed within 30 minutes by aftershocks of 1.1 and 1.9 magnitude, but Jorgenson said the seismic activity is no cause for alarm. ``It's not an indicator of a larger quake to come,'' she said.
CLASSROOM CHRONICLESClassroom Chronicles is an occasional series exploring the controversies, ideas and programs that are shaping the school environment for students today and that will have a profound effect on the skills of California's 21st century workforce. If you have a comment or story idea, please send it to Classroom Chronicles, 901 Mission St., San Francisco, CA 94103, or send e- mail to: classroom@sfgate.com. |
· Printer-friendly
version
|