A Cyber-Glimmer of Hope in the Rust Belt

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A Cyber-Glimmer of Hope in the Rust Belt

11/19/2003

By Terry Calhoun

We've taken a look recently at feral users, students who've become adept at life on the Internet without parental or school training or acculturation and who interact in a kind of Lord of the Flies cyberworld. We've also thought and read a lot about the technology expectations with which our students arrive at college. Last week I was privileged to visit the Western Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School in Midland, Pennsylvania.

The school's story is a great one, demonstrating how creative use of information technology in a small, economically depressed school district can provide benefits to both a local constituency and a geographically-dispersed one. It also raises the bar for higher education, with its implications about the skill levels, experiences, and expectations for learning delivery of a growing number of K-12 students heading our way. And it raises a hope that there may actually be some adults interacting with some K-12 kids in cyberspace; maybe we won't have to acculturate all of them for the first time as freshmen.

After leaving the US Green Building Council GreenBuild Conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I drove south 45 minutes from through hill country into Chester, West Virginia, across the Ohio River into East Liverpool, Ohio, then along the river, upstream, to Midland, a city that has visibly suffered economically in past decades. Upstream and across the river, I could see signs of prosperity in the huge plumes of steam rising from electricity generating plants - also in Pennsylvania, but economically a world away.

In some ways, visiting this region is like visiting the Third World. You might assume, when you find a state-of-the-art cyber school located in this kind of place but serving students over a widely-distributed geographic area, that the school was placed here by someone who chose the location to take advantage of cheap wages and cheap rent. Not so in this case, the Western Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School was home grown. Here's how it happened.

When the steel industry collapsed in the 1980s, Midland was left with an 80 percent unemployment rate, during the next decade the number of students enrolled in the district dwindled by 60 percent. In 1985, Midland actually closed its high school - which had previously been a regular state-wide contender in basketball. Midland tried to include itself in regional school district consolidations within Pennsylvania, but no one wanted the financially bankrupt town's students. This led to the strange situation, continuing to this day, in which students from Midland, Pennsylvania attend high school in neighboring East Liverpool, Ohio.

Not sure how long the agreement with East Liverpool would last, and intending to widen its options, Midland chartered an Internet-based high school as a backup. That idea, with the leadership of the visionary and entrepreneurial district school superintendent Dr. Nick Trombetta, was expanded to a K-12 concept, leading to the now very successful Western Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School (WPCCS), which serves nearly 2,200 students from around Pennsylvania and is continuing to grow at light speed. There are nearly as many students "attending" the school as there are residents in the town, but on any given day you won't find students physically in the school's office.