March 26, 2001

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A School Transformed

By Marianne Kolbasuk McGee   (mmcgee@cmp.com)

t's a Thursday morning in mid-March at Carmen Arace Middle School in Bloomfield, Conn., a suburb about five miles north of Hartford. A class of fifth-graders is nestled at their desks, positioned in groups of four to six students so that each of their laptop computers is aligned under the classroom's half-dozen or so infrared ceiling access points. Through the infrared connections, the laptops are linked wirelessly to the school's servers and to the Internet. The students are practicing math facts on a Web site that features a flash-card-like game.

In the eighth-grade wing, a class of honor students is working on a social studies assignment that was E-mailed to their laptops by their teacher, who's out sick. A substitute teacher walks around the hushed room of busy students, offering help when needed. Meanwhile, in the school library, small groups of fifth-graders work on a collaborative writing assignment with a group of students visiting from a nearby school.

For the writing project, Carmen Arace students are sharing their laptops with children from Timothy Edwards Middle School in South Windsor, Conn. That's ironic, because most of the students from Timothy Edwards are white and their town is affluent; Carmen Arace's student body, by contrast, is 90% African-American, Jamaican, and West Indian. The project is part of a state program to mix children of different ethnicity and economic backgrounds in schools.

On this day, the more-affluent kids have the opportunity to use technology at Carmen Arace that their own school doesn't have. Every one of Carmen Arace's 800-plus students and 70 teachers is equipped with a Hewlett-Packard laptop computer, which they bring home with them every day.

Not so long ago, few students from other communities would find much reason or incentive to visit Carmen Arace, let alone attend the middle school. "The school had a terrible reputation," says Jerry Crystal, Carmen Arace's director of technology integration and an educator for 18 years. A majority of the school's students were failing Connecticut's reading, writing, and math exams. The school was also suffering from "bright flight," where brighter students left troubled Carmen Arace to attend parochial or private school, if their parents could afford it.

The bold decision three years ago to put technology into the hands of every Carmen Arace student is transforming the school and its population.

In the late 1990s, the Bloomfield Public School District, realizing that its problems were rooted in the community, formed a task force of parents, teachers, social workers, and civic leaders to explore the extent of the trouble and to identify possible solutions. The task force conducted surveys and interviews among all sectors of the population. The result: It discovered that societal changes were taking place, including more two-parent working families, fewer extended families, and more grandparents raising young children--and these changes were proving difficult for some families to handle. A changing job market and a general lack of technological skills were also taking a toll on the community by limiting career choices, Crystal says.

"The universal concern was that the schools were technologically inadequate to prepare Bloomfield's students and families for careers in the 21st century," he says. Only about 30% of students had computers at home. The community needed tools and skills to be competitive. That's when Carmen Arace decided to make the leap. In 1998, the school applied for and received state and federal grant money to wire its classrooms. The government funds didn't cover computers for every student, so the school signed up as one of 14 schools to participate in a student laptops pilot program offered by NetSchools Corp., a provider of E-learning technology and consulting services to the K-12 market.

Carmen Arace financed the remaining $2.1 million cost of the project, which included the laptops, servers, printers, and tech support, with a five-year bank loan. While the school didn't receive outside financial help from businesses, NetSchools has been generous: Under terms of the original deal, NetSchools was to provide Carmen Arace two on-site support people for a year for free; now the company is in its third year of providing the service. NetSchools, which also gave Carmen Arace a discount on the laptops, will continue the free service until the school can support itself.

Carmen Arace has become a model school for NetSchools, says Bill Morton, a regional manager at the company. "Bloomfield had a need to make a change in the delivery of education, and it's a good example of what a school can do," he says. "We've put in extra resources and time, and they've been very gracious." Unfortunately, Morton says, businesses aren't overly anxious to contribute to school technology programs. "Most companies give just a stipend, but helping with these programs is good for the company, too. It helps provide students with technology tools and skills for the future, and it's also a tax write-off," he says.

The Bloomfield school district hopes business alliances will help defray the costs of wiring and purchasing laptops for its high school, Crystal says. The district is about two years behind in this initiative because of funding issues related to a $7.3 million renovation project that Bloomfield High School needs to complete to keep its state accreditation.

Carmen Arace eighth-graders are holding out hope that the high school will get wired and they'll get their laptops. Like many schools across the United States, Bloomfield High has only a computer lab that's used periodically by students. "It'll be a big change not to have computers in high school," eighth-grade honor student Jessica Swetsky says, as she taps away on her laptop, completing a social-studies assignment. "They make learning a lot more fun."

And it shows. Since introducing the laptops, Carmen Arace's enrollment has risen by 20%, disciplinary suspensions are down 80%, and scores on writing and math tests have risen by about 35%. Kids are motivated. "Behavioral problems have disappeared. The kids are more interested in the lessons," says Jennifer Friday, a fifth-grade social studies and science teacher. That can only bode well for feeding the IT workforce of tomorrow.

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