South Eugene High School

400E 19th Avenue, Eugene, Oregon, USA

Interview with BJ

5th November 1999

1. AF: Question 1: Does the school have a policy for the use of information technology across all subject areas?

2. BJ: We have a 4J policy that covers the entire district. To break it down, and keep it simple, what they want to do is to make sure kids are getting free and safe access to the internet, and they kind of break it down in to ages groups, in terms of; in order to get an e-mail account, if you are in grade school or middle school, you have to have your parent's permission. And then it has to be teacher permission too. But in High School, it is just parental permission. That's going to be a sticky issue for me, because kids now can go out on Hotmail, Yahoo, and get their own e-mail account and I have no idea if they have their parent's permission. That's why it is good that the district is going to a web-mail system, so I can start attracting those kids back, and kind of monitor what those kids are doing. As far as web-usage is concerned, you can get into the legalities all you want, but it basically breaks down into they know what's acceptable behaviour in the lab, and what's not, or indeed on any other computers, and it is up to us as individual teachers within the building who are running these programs to make sure that happens. Because we are guaranteeing the parents that we set this policy, that we are going to set a safe environment for students to let things continue. And there are severe penalties involved with abuse of the system.

3. AF: How does this link with their use of computers in subject areas such as English or Art etc.?

4. BJ: Well, what happens here is that, if a teacher wants to come in and use the lab, which is the best format for them, because they've got a whole bunch of computers in one area, and you can put in 30 or 40 students, they are going to come to me with a design, or an idea for a design, in their program for a one day, a three day, whatever, project. And then I kind of walk them through that in terms of ..<pause> ... it really depends what school you're at. I mean this school is really liberal, so if an art program depends upon looking at some pictures that might involve partially nude bodies, well the teacher will send home a letter to the parents, saying this is what I want to do, and if you don't want your kid to participate, I'll think up an alternative, and you won't get a lot of backlash. But if you were in a different high school, in this district, and it's a different socio-economic base, you might get a lot more of a backlash. A lot of those kind of schools don't offer those kind of art courses either. We do. We also have an intensive graphics arts program, so you may want to stop by there afterwards.

5. And they do. They come to me a lot, it's a new thing, for teachers here. Before I was hired, there was not a lot of use of the lab unless there was a very computer savvy teacher. We are also facing a transition, nationwide, and especially in Oregon, for people are retiring, and so we are getting a lot of younger teachers. And the younger teachers come to me a lot more, than the older class teachers do.

6. They are a lot more comfortable with the technology. I put together a couple of seminars every year, trying to induce older teachers to come in and start experimenting. Lorein, the librarian we just visited, she's an example of an older teacher who has changed in mid-career and said ' I want to use computers'. Up until 2 years ago, she'd not done any more than surf the web a couple of times, and type up using a word-processor. It's a big leap for her, and she has already realised that's where libraries were going, and she had been an English teacher for 4 years before this. She had been a librarian at Grade-school before so it was a big transition to move to a high school, and she used the transition period, and she took advantage of that.

7. AF: Question 2: If so, how was it formed?

8. BJ: The District had a committee, and they came up with a bunch of rules. It's my job to make sure those rules are enforced. It's difficult at times, because the rules don't always fit with the technology that advances. We have a parent here who sits on that committee, so I talk to her about a lot of things, she brings them up, they meet about 3 times a year.

9. AF: Question 3: What policies are there at school district, county, state and national levels that contribute to the way in which IT is used across the curriculum in the school?

10. BJ: Right now there isn't, although I think as more funding is.., because 80% of our school district funding comes from the State-Federal level. That's a big reversal from 10 years ago. So instead of being based upon your local taxes, your getting everything from the state level and the Federal level. I suspect we will see that, but right now we are not getting a lot of impact from them, other than in the media. They don't have a big list of things we have to do, this way.

11. AF: Have you seen ISTE's NETS standards?

12. BJ: Yes, I have seen those. And part of that is because almost all, a lot of their money came, the grants they got, were Federal. So when you start getting the Federal grants, you got to start playing by the Federal rules. Now, we currently don't have any big Federal grants going on in this building, ... if we did... we'd have to start dealing with it. Now, our country doesn't tend to have at this level of education, at the secondary level, a lot of federal money that is mandated. They give block grants to the states, and the states distribute the money as they see fit. So if you go to Texas say, the state is very structured, you are supposed to be able to go into every school and know what is happening, every classroom is supposed to be on the same page of the textbook. In Oregon, it's not that way. You have much more individuality in the state, and then of course, at the district level. And that just tends to be our educational system, unlike say the Japanese where everybody buys the same textbook.

13. AF: Question 4: How many students are enrolled?

14. BJ: 1768 or 1762. It's usually about 1800 at this time of the year.

15. AF: Question 5: What are the highest and lowest grades taught?

16. BJ: 9 to 12, so you're 14 to 18 years old.

17. AF: Question 6: What is the level of computer provision (in terms of the number of students to each multi-media computer), and what proportion of the computer equipment is internet-connected?

18. BJ: 2 labs (33+20), then science (8 not connected to the internet, because they can't supervise them), but they can bring students to the labs. I would like to move these two labs to somewhere in the middle of the school, so everyone feels they have equal access to them, and have one room strictly for classes, and one room for drop-ins, but I can monitor both. 19 computers in the yearbook and AXE (monthly newspaper) which has won awards, so they have g3 PowerMacs, they have updated those recently. Individual teachers sometimes give access to students, but not as a class. Also 8 in graphic design, 5 in the library, giving a total of 93 multimedia computers, with only 66 of them on the internet. That's about 19 students per computer.

19. AF: The national average is supposed to be 5 students per computer

20. BJ: I don't think that's an accurate thing, it's skewed to, because, what you are dealing with is you have grade schools where there are 200-300 kids, and if they have 60 computers, they've got about a ratio of 5, but when you come to a high school, even if you have 1000 students, you've got to have 200-300 computers to give all those students access. There's only 2 high schools in this town out of 4 that come even close to that, which is Sheldon and Churchill, and it comes down to money.

21. AF: Not just capital money, but continuous money, to keep up to date.

22. BJ: The only newer computers are in the labs, where we have made a conscious effort to keep up. The exception is in the publications area, where she raises money through advertising, that's where half her money came from over the last two years to upgrade her machines. We don't quite have the same opportunity. I'm looking to see if we can advertise on our web-page, but I don't think we will be able to raise the same kind of money. So my big issue, is that we need to get some kind of grant, because that is what they did 5 years ago, and all those machines now are obsolete, and they were 5200, 5400 and LC575 Macintoshes which no longer function very well, if at all, with the newer software.

23. AF: In Tassie they sometimes go to leasing

24. BJ: They did that at Roosvelt - did you talk to them about that?

25. AF: No.

26. BJ: They got burned.

27. AF: It locks the schools into a definite on-going computer budget, and shows them what a lot a of computers can do.

28. BJ: The biggest problem we have right now is where we live. In Oregon, this area used to be very tax-rich. It was all based upon lumber. It was built in at the Federal-state level, that a certain percentage of the sales went to the local government. And a majority of that went to the school system. So for years and years and years - we're talking 60 years, there was a flood of money, that's why this is one of the top school districts in the nation. And then the late 70's hit, there was a recession, and logging in the late 80's started running out of forest, and there was a big battle over conservation of what is left, and what you've seen is about an 80% reduction in the taxes in the last 20 years. And that is one of the reasons why we have moved from a locally to a state level funding. The other factor is that the budget for this school hasn't changed in 13 years, and computers weren't involved 13 years ago, and so we keep taking a larger and larger percentage of the budget - we're trying to...

29. My other battle is .. this school is .. this schools is described as many things, but the one that cracks me up is 'the elephant's boneyard'. It's where all the older teachers want to come and teach. You have students that are willing to do extra stuff, not just whatever it takes to pass the class. Many of them, you know, 80% of the kids go to college every year, they're thinking ahead already, so it's a great venue to work in. As a teacher where you can get out there and do some stuff you've always wanted to do, but you were held back by your location. These are older teachers, and they have no interest whatsoever in giving up money for computers because they don't use them in their curriculum.

30. If we could get more money, just for technology, particularly from outside sources, the better off we are. In terms... because eventually that's going to change, you know, because it's going to be integrated into everything, and that's where I want to go. I would like to be integrating with all the different subject areas, and you know, have you talked to anybody about cyberschool yet?

31. AF: Yes. Question 7: What proportion of the students would you estimate have access to a computer outside school?

32. BJ: About 70%. A lot of the kids in this school have access to computers at home. After the summer break, I have kids come in with $5000 systems - and all I can say is you're lucky you've got a lab in school you can come to!

33. AF: Question 8: Do your policies cover the relationship between home and school computing?

34. BJ: That's a new area for us. We are trying to do that. I think our biggest issue is that we don't have a big enough communication with the parents and what their kids do with computers at home. Now that's something parents should know. I think Johnny or Jane go up to the bedroom and start doing their own thing, and those parents have no idea what it really is unless the kids says, here look what I did! And that's a big battle, getting parents involved with what's going on.

35. AF: How about sending attendance home by e-mail

36. BJ: Well, actually, we're starting a new pilot program called Achieve dot com. They've offered the first 100 schools or districts that join will get free access for the rest of that program's life. And what it is, it's kind of like, you take everything that's involved in the school, from the daily announcements to the daily sporting activities, academic activities, when the play's being put on, and I am the webmaster basically of this, and I can then give permissions to various people to put various things on here, so we would have daily announcements here, we'd have daily events on here, and it's a uniform screen, in other words there is always this bar at the side when you are moving around inside, but also the idea of what you want to do is put their entire workload up, and so the kids can go, well, I was sick for 2 days, I can log in from home, and see what my assignments are, when they are supposed to be in to my teacher. It wouldn't work for every class, but I think that if it caught on, teachers would 99999 they would work better for most of your core classes, and the other think is the kid's parents can get permissions to log on and see what their kids homework is. I just did the phone interview with those folks last week, and I'm trying to get 3-5 teachers this year up and running on that. Then I can pull in the parents - so we'll see, that could be a solution to everything.