A Cyber-Glimmer of Hope in the Rust Belt
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.
WPCCS mostly serves home-schooled learners who represent a range of students.
Quite a few have medical, disciplinary, or other kinds of problems that make
attending a physical school difficult, and many simply made the choice to learn
online. Some high school students take as many as three courses at a time from
a half-dozen community colleges through WPCCS, in addition to their regular
high school curriculum. About half of the students are of high school age, but
the range g'es right down to kindergarten. Enrolled students receive computer
hardware and software and Internet connectivity through licensed vendors, and
supplies like textbooks directly from the cyber school.
What makes the school a success for the students and families is its high-tech,
high-touch focus on customer service and learning. The staff includes technicians
and administrators, but also tutors, layers of instructional supervisors, and
others who are on tap for students and parents via phone and e-mail (WebMail).
A requirement of the school is that each student and a parent conduct a weekly
progress status conversation with WPCCS staff. Students have a choice of curricula
and the school has recently implemented Blackboard. I spoke with one instructional
supervisor, Randy Calhoun, who is a thirty-year retiree from the East Liverpool
School District. He says that for a veteran teacher like himself, "the
constant flow of phone calls and e-mails with parents and students brings an
entirely new and very satisfying perspective to the relationship between students
and their school." He also notes that the school organizes some real world
activities, such as visits to cultural centers, in order to satisfy specific
curriculum requirements.
What makes the school a success for Midland is its revenue generation, as state
funding for students - based on state dollars that their home school system
would otherwise receive - flows into Midland. Exact numbers weren't available
to me, but from just common knowledge, that's probably an average of several
thousand dollars per student per year, for more than 2,000 students in a town
that only has a few more than 3,000 residents. It's no wonder that the local
millage for the Midland School District has gone down three years in a row.
And it is a wonderful thing that without the expense of bricks and mortar, the
WPCCS playing a growing role in the area's economy and has become the largest
local employer.
What d'es all this mean for folks in higher education? Well, as I said at the
beginning, these 2,000+ students are spending a lot of time in cyberspace, and
they're doing it with involvement from both parents and teachers - a situation
unlike the cyberspace experience of most K-12 students. I expect that by the
time they graduate from high school, these students will be a little better-behaved
online than their peers.
Further, students like these are going to reach us on campus with expectations
about course delivery and level of customer service that have been shaped by
a high-tech, high-touch online K-12 experience. If you factor in these students'
expectations with related news stories like the one about Primrose School Franchising
Company providing laptops to three-year-olds at its 120 locations - that's right,
toddlers, basically - it is evidence once more that we have still only seen
the tip of the information technology transformation iceberg in higher education.
