Ewing-Northern Grade School District #115 is a rural, single-building district with 265 students in kindergarten through eighth grade. Like most districts in Illinois, it has developed a three to five year community based technology plan following the blueprint of the Illinois State Board of Education Technology Outreach Center. The plan includes Professional Development, Engaged Learning, Community Involvement, and Technology Deployment.

Because it is located in a part of Illinois that has some of the state's highest unemployment rates, Ewing relies heavily on Title 1, Goals 2000, Technology Literacy and other state and Federal grants to fund many of the plan's initiatives.

District Pilots Technology Training

Ewing launched its technology plan in October 1996 after receiving a $45,000 Illinois state Building Based Innovations Through Technology grant. They used part of the funds to implement FUTUREKIDS School Technology Solutions (Los Angeles, CA), which offers comprehensive computer-literacy training programs for both students and faculty.

Ewing's 12 teachers received FUTUREKIDS staff development training over a three month period. The 45-hour series of courses equipped them with fundamental computing skills in 10 core technology areas, such as word processing, telecommunications, spreadsheets and multimedia.

Since completing the program, Ewing Principal Marian Nipper has seen her staff evolve from not wanting to use computers to using them after school all the time. "The teachers use technology more now because they're more comfortable with it," she says. "The lab is never empty."

As the teachers became more confident in their computing skills, they began teaching technology to their students using specially designed FUTUREKIDS student curriculum. The K-8 curriculum teaches skills in the same 10 areas in which teachers were trained, but using an engaged learning environment and grade-specific technology objectives as outlined in a Scope & Sequence document.

At first, some parents thought the FUTUREKIDS training might steer the children away from academic learning, but, because the curriculum incorporates academic themes into al of its lessons, traditional subjects such as math and social studies are reinforced. As a result, in addition to developing lifelong technology skills, Ewing students achieved higher ratings in state assessment tests.

Scores for Ewing students tested under Illinois Goals Assessment Program (IGAP) for 1996-1997 were above the state average in every subject area. Nipper attributes this improvement, in part, to the FUTUREKIDS training. "The students were below average in social science the previous year," she says, "but access to the Internet and current real-world information helped improve that situation."

The Illinois state grant money also helped to network Ewing with Novell NetWare and to establish a T2 wireless Internet connection. Once the building was wired and the staff comfortable with technology, the lab was opened up to local residents for no-cost, after-hours computer training to meet the technology plan's goals of community involvement.

Technology Plan Expansion

Ewing's technology plan was expanded in early 1997 when they received a federal Goals 2000 grant, enabling the district to continue offering the FUTUREKIDS student curriculum. Additional districts within the Southern Illinois Franklin/Williamson Regional Office of Education (ROE) #21 also received Goals 2000 grants, allowing 16 more schools to implement FUTUREKIDS staff development and student curriculum as part of their technology plans.

The grants applied for within ROE #21 were correlated together to support FUTUREKIDS, since technology is a primary educational objective. The Southern Illinois technology plans have shown that poor, rural school districts can provide students of all ages with the latest hardware, software and technology skills so that they will be prepared to enter the work force of the 21st century according to Marla Harp, grant writer and technology coordinator for ROE #21.

It was Harp, a graduate of Ewing herself, who discovered FUTUREKIDS and incorporates its programs into her grant applications. Her schools will continue the FUTUREKIDS training well into the next century because it provides the skills required by the technology-deployment component of the long-term technology plans, and prepares teachers and students to apply those skills both inside and outside the school environment.

In coming years the schools will augment the FUTUREKIDS training with their own technology-based projects, the first of which was launched in January. It is a groundbreaking science program, piloted again by Ewing, which relies heavily on the well-developed computer skills of students and teachers.