Rural Revolution

A small school takes big strides with technology

By Danny Shaw

Danny Shaw is principal of Aiken Elementary School in Aiken, S.C.

Nestled near the gateway to South Carolina's sandy Atlantic flatlands, Aiken Elementary isn't in the kind of community where you'd expect to find a technology revolution. Much of the community is rural, and poverty is a stark reality for many of our children. More than a third of our students receive free or reduced-price lunches.

Yet educators come from all over the country to see what we're doing here. We are showing that technology can have a demonstrable effect on achievement in a school where 37 percent of the students are minorities. Redbook magazine recently named our school one of the 142 best elementary schools in the country, and the best one in South Carolina; and Aiken Elementary has been recognized as a national school of excellence by the U.S. Department of Education.

But if I credited our success entirely to technology, I would be giving technology far more credit than it deserves. We have a 97 percent attendance rate among our teaching staff, and our teachers are the ones who make the connections between learning and technology work on a daily basis.

What I can safely say, though, is I believe the technology we've incorporated into school life has been one of the major reasons for our success. I believe it's a big reason our average scores on reading, math, science, and language tests are well above district and state averages.

For instance, last year 66 percent of our fourth-graders scored above the 50th percentile on a standardized reading test, compared with 44 percent districtwide and 37 percent statewide. We also scored way ahead of district and state averages on standardized math and language tests. To top it off, Aiken has maintained a student-attendance rate of 96 percent or higher for the past three years.

And we've accomplished all this without overburdening our taxpayers. Our cost per student is $3,822, which is about $2,000 below the national average. In other words, without spending tons of money, we've found a way to encourage our kids to want to come to school; and most important, once they get here, they learn.

Achieving our goals

We have what I believe is perhaps the most advanced elementary school technology system in South Carolina. Not surprisingly, we are often mistaken for being a magnet school for technology or for gifted students, when, in reality, the school reflects the population of a small southern town.

But when you walk into our school, you realize we are anything but average. We have 400 IBM computers for 873 students, software packages tailored to each academic discipline, CD-ROM, state-of-the-art technologies for music and the arts, connections to the Internet, CompuServe, a variety of electronic bulletin boards and e-mail systems, and the only distance-learning satellite dish found in an elementary school anywhere in the state.

All this did not come about overnight. We spend a good amount of time hustling for grants to find the money to maintain what we're doing, and each year, we do a little more. Of the 1,060 public schools in South Carolina, Aiken is one of only six to win incentive awards from the state education department every year for the past 10 years. We got nearly $400,000 from those grants alone.

What we also have from the state department of education--which I see as vital to our success--is status as a deregulated school. In other words, we are free of most of the mandates that place constraints on how a school uses its time. And the way we use our time is a key to the link between technology and student achievement.

For instance, the state requires 175 minutes a week of social studies for students. If we had to adhere to those types of constraints, we would not be able to require that every student spend at least 20 minutes a day working on school projects in our computer lab. Yet we do exactly that.

Why? Because we want to make sure that technology is a daily part of our students' educations. The school has computer terminals and workstations in every classroom, but we know time won't permit all students to use those every day. That's why we build in the 20 minutes of lab time every day for every student.

Two classes are scheduled simultaneously in the 64-computer lab. During that time, classroom teachers remain in the lab with students, along with two technology specialists assigned to the lab. This means we often have a ratio of one adult for every 10 or 12 students, which allows our staff to offer more individual attention. We have from four to six computers in each of our classrooms, which have about 22 students per class.

The pervasive approach

But that is just one way in which we try to infuse technology into school life. Also, our entire building is networked. This allows students to continue working on the same projects before, during, and after their scheduled lab times. They can access the same project from the lab or their classroom.

Again, time, and how it is used, becomes an important issue. If students and teachers were boxed into scheduled holes that determine how long they could devote to a particular subject, students would not have as many opportunities to use interactive video or CD-ROM to explore a science problem, or to use the technology-assisted music software to learn to read music and play a keyboard.

Our music classroom has 30 computer workstations. Research tells us that students who study music develop analytical skills that make them better thinkers. We think technology has sparked a rebirth of interest in music education for all students. And the new technologies seem to get kids more interested in music, whether they are gifted musicians or not.

The school's media center is fully equipped with an automated check-out system that allows students to log on from classroom computers, and check out materials. A video lab comparable to what you might see in a commercial television studio is also part of the media center.

All classrooms have color televisions, and programs can be taped in the video lab and played throughout the building on the school's distribution system and in-house television channels. We have even created a video newsletter we send to parents.

Foreign language programs have also been improved by the infusion of technology. All our fifth-grade students learn German, and we use our satellite dish to broadcast German television programs into our classrooms from stations in Germany.

All guidance and administrative records are kept in the school's computer network, and special-needs students' individualized education plans are generated by computer, which saves the special-education staff untold hours.

So, technology is not just an add-on at Aiken. It is an integral part of the daily lives of students and teachers--so much so that I think we have created a "school of tomorrow." And I truly believe that a school of tomorrow has students who want to learn in school today.