Middle Schools Of The Year: Wired For The Future

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On the northern edge of Georgia, where the Hiawassee River rushes out of the Smoky Mountains, natural beauty keeps close company with human poverty. A winding, hour-long drive from the nearest interstate highway, Towns County is one of Georgia's poorest and most isolated localities, where the average annual wage is $19,656, and 38% of schoolkids qualify for a subsidized lunch. Yet the county also boasts one of the best-wired middle schools in the U.S.

As yellow buses deposit their passengers at the Towns County Comprehensive School, serving students in pre-K through grade 12, you can instantly tell which are the middle schoolers: each totes a tough, silvery NetSchools laptop computer that can be dropped from 5 ft. without breaking. Infrared sensors in classroom ceilings connect the laptops to the school's server and the Internet. Teachers of everything from science to American history incorporate the Web into lesson plans. Away from school, kids plug their laptops into phone lines to question teachers or online experts about homework, or check cafeteria menus. When students are out sick, their teachers e-mail their missed assignments.

Since Towns adopted e-learning in 1998, its middle-schoolers' scores on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills have risen nine percentile points. Attendance has improved, and disciplinary referrals to the principal's office are down by more than half. State assessments of their writing show Towns' eighth-graders scoring 16 points higher than the Georgia average.

This is not a typical response to new technology. U.S. schools lately have thrown boatloads of money at software and hardware--often with dubious results. Many school computers aren't effectively linked to the Internet, and teachers often aren't trained in e-learning. But Towns benefited from the struggles of others.

Middle-school principal Stephen Smith, 53, initially wanted laptops just for teachers. But the teachers urged him to find ways to buy computers for students as well. The federally funded Appalachian Regional Commission contributed nearly 80% of the $500,000 cost of wiring the middle school. Smith raised the rest from local donations. Towns decided to start by wiring the sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders because, Smith says, "they want to know everything and do everything." Smith hopes that by 2002, every high school student will also have a laptop.

Last month seventh- and eighth-graders studying Jules Verne's A Journey to the Center of the Earth tapped into a website to see live shots of active volcanoes and examine diagrams of the earth's core. On the same day, math students manipulated the size and shape of triangles on their laptops, watching as the angles and areas changed. "When you can see it, you can believe it," says teacher Heather Marshall. Learning on laptops, she says, is at once "deeper" and more fun.

The program has inspired parents as well. They volunteer more at school than before, and adult-education enrollment has increased--with parents borrowing their kids' computers for assignments.

--Reported by Anne Berryman/Hiawassee