Sidebar: When Computers Come Home

By Andrew Trotter

Andrew Trotter is an associate editor of Electronic School.

Ana and Luciano Calles beam as they recount the achievements of their youngest son: At 15, Juan is an A/B student, a science prizewinner, an athlete, and a computer whiz in the Union City (N.J.) schools. But his parents give some of the credit for his success to Bell Atlantic Corp., which provided Juan with a home computer.

Juan enrolled at the Christopher Columbus School in the fall of 1993, just as the district began a two-year experiment--Project Explore, underwritten by Bell Atlantic--to put PCs in the homes of the school's 135 seventh-graders.

The project was part of a partnership with the district to start a small high-tech school in the heart of a poor, mostly Hispanic neighborhood. All the school's teachers also received home computers. And two communications networks linked home and school computers with district servers. High-speed ISDN phone lines and frame-relay technology gave the system the capacity to handle multimedia applications.

From their home PCs, the students could access on-line encyclopedias and other information on the servers and exchange e-mail with anyone in the district. Those functions were important at Columbus, where students learn much of the curriculum through their own research projects. But Project Explore encouraged parents and siblings to use the home computers, too--with the idea, in part, that parents would use e-mail to enrich relationships with teachers. The school also offered parents free training in word processing, spreadsheets, and other computer tools.

In the Calles family's modest two-bedroom apartment, the computer occupies a prominent space--a study alcove decorated with trophies and maps. It's not the latest machine but still powerful, with a 386 processor, a CD-ROM drive, modem, and dot-matrix printer. The software includes a "works" package, a drawing program, and a CD-ROM encyclopedia.

The Calleses, who emigrated from El Salvador in the 1970s, say they would have been hard-pressed to buy such equipment. Ana has a small day-care business; Luciano works nights as a machine operator. When the computer was delivered, Ana says, "there was a party in this house."

That celebration was only the beginning, because Juan is one of those students for whom a computer is a catalyst for school achievement. In elementary school, Juan wasn't motivated to do his homework or to investigate new things, Ana says. "He wasn't the kind of student he is now."

Juan has used the computer chiefly for research and writing. Having on-line and CD-ROM-based research capability is valuable in a city where the public library is closed on Sundays--plus Saturdays in summertime. In seventh grade, his report on an egg-hatching experiment won the school science fair. Juan won the districtwide science prize the next year, with a report on how cholesterol affects children.

The machine also fueled Juan's interest in computer programming. He can already troubleshoot glitches on the computers at school, and he aspires to study computer engineering at MIT.

Juan's emerging academic skills make that goal a real possibility. As for Project Explore students as a whole, teachers reported seeing a "marked improvement in students' ability to write," according to one report. And teachers told Electronic School that the exchange of e-mail gave them an unusually close relationship with the students who had home computers.

The computer "changed our life, too," Ana says. She has used the computer to communicate with teachers about Juan's progress and to write "well-presented" letters for her day-care business. Of her son, she says, "he is our mentor, our teacher, and we are the students. For us, it's beautiful."

This year Juan was a ninth-grader at Emerson High School, where only a few students had a home computer. His study alcove accordingly became a homework station for his friends. Upon leaving Columbus, he would have had to give his computer back, but Bell Atlantic and the district have extended the project through 10th grade. Juan hopes he can keep the computer permanently.

If not, his parents might find a way to replace it, because they certainly are convinced of its benefits. For his 15th birthday, Ana and Luciano saved up to buy Juan a color printer.

In February, Juan, Ana, and Luciano were called back to Columbus to attend a visit by President Bill Clinton. Fresh from signing the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Clinton hailed the school as a model for how computers and telecommunications can transform learning. The Calles family certainly would agree.