Class Via Satellite : Small-Town Schools Get on the Beam

PLEVNA, Mont. —  OK, class, time for a pop quiz. What’s wrong with this picture?

Harry Wohlert greets his beginning German students with a hardy “Guten Tag,” bids a couple of them “Happy Birthday,” talks a little about the weather, chats about life in Germany, conjugates some verbs, fields some questions and outlines the next homework assignment.

What’s wrong? Nothing, except that Wohlert is in a television studio in Oklahoma and his 1,100 students are spread across 12 states. Two of them, high school seniors, are glued to a color TV monitor here in this dusty hamlet hidden among the buttes and scrub land of southeastern Montana.

Rural Receivers

Across America’s open spaces, rural schools have begun to sprout satellite dishes. Pressed by declining enrollment, lack of funds and a shortage of teachers, school districts are turning to innovative technology to give students quality courses they would otherwise miss--live and at a fraction of the cost of hiring a full-time instructor.

And while one-way TV instruction has been around for decades, the new technology gives students the ability to talk back and forth with their video instructors, coming close to duplicating the intimate atmosphere of the individual classroom.

Aided by satellites, computers, WATS lines and other electronic wonders, schools that not long ago could barely pay to teach the three R’s can now let their students actively participate in German, French, physics, calculus, computer science, art history and many other advanced classes.

“When you have really bright kids, you’re holding them back by not having these courses,” said George Bailey, the school superintendent here in Plevna, which boasts a total of 30 high school students and a five-member senior class. “ . . . It’s just hard to get into these specialty courses because of the cost. But by using this technology, we can afford it.”

136 Miles for a Big Mac

The German class cost Plevna $2,000, the price of the satellite receiver, plus another $1,750 annual subscription fee. That is far less than the $12,000 it would cost to hire a certified half-time language teacher, presuming one could even be found in Plevna, a community so remote that residents say they think nothing of driving 136 miles round trip to Miles City for a Big Mac.

Wohlert’s class is produced by Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, which pioneered the satellite classroom concept three years ago and now beams German and other courses to 165 high schools in a dozen states.

The separate, privately owned TI-IN network based in San Antonio has an even broader curriculum, selling more than 20 advanced level high school courses to 300 schools and education agencies in 22 states from Vermont to California.

On a smaller scale, rural school districts in Minnesota have established elaborate cable ties which let them share faculty for sparsely attended specialty courses such as Latin, astronomy and calculus. Teachers and students in classrooms sometimes 50 miles or more apart are linked together through banks of cameras and microphones.

Even big cities are beginning to tune in. Des Moines recently linked five high schools with a fiber optic cable network that will allow teachers and students in remote buildings to see and hear each other. Instead of having hard-to-find teachers for courses like Latin or calculus shuttle between schools, officials hope the system will lead to multi-campus classes in some advanced subjects.

California State University at Chico has extended the concept to higher education, offering degree courses by television to students in remote classrooms throughout a 12-county region in Northern California. The school also offers post-graduate courses by satellite to engineers at many high-technology firms in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

Eyeing these developments, both the Senate and House earlier this year approved competing versions of a plan by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, to provide federal seed money to build high-tech video school networks across the country.

‘Star Schools’

Though differences remain to be ironed out, both measures in general would authorize $100 million over the next five years to buy telecommunications hardware for state and regional networks that specialize in mathematics, science and foreign language instruction.

Kennedy, who has dubbed the concept “Star Schools,” claimed that it was a cheap price to pay to counteract a drastic decline in both the quality and quantity of training in technical fields available to America’s youth.

Citing figures that show Japanese and European students outscoring American counterparts on standard math and science achievement tests, Kennedy argued at hearings on the legislation earlier this year that such an educational gap would translate into a widening trade gap as American firms find themselves hamstrung by an increasingly unsophisticated work force.

“The costs to this nation of a continued failure to teach math and science to our children will be enormous,” Kennedy said. “The very least we will lose will be billions upon billions of dollars in trade revenue. The true cost of inaction will be the lost talents of an entire generation of our people, and that is ground we will never regain.”

Educational experts agree that the trend lines are ominous. Some examples: A recent survey by the U.S. Department of Education found only 36% of American high schools offer a course in physics. The National Science Board estimates the demand for math and science teachers will more than double from 140,000 today to 300,000 by 1995. Yet the National Science Teachers Assn. says 30% of those now teaching math and science are not qualified, and 40% of the work force is expected to retire in the next few years.

Not only are schools having a hard time finding good teachers for advanced subjects, but when money gets tight those courses are usually the first to face the budget ax. Rick Borten, head of a state agency which is trying to start a video network linking Massachusetts schools, said a survey of nine high schools in affluent Boston suburbs showed that 72 courses had been dropped over a recent five year period--including Greek, German, advanced algebra and physics--either because enrollment was low or cost too high.

“We have a very serious educational problem that threatens our ability to compete as a nation in an increasingly competitive international educational and business environment,” Borten contended.

In rural areas, the problem is even more acute. Lawrence Boger, the president of Oklahoma State University, said 82% of the public schools in his state are in farm communities which have trouble luring scarce educational specialists at any price.

“In Beaver and Gage and Gotebo and Bug Tussle, they can’t afford language teachers or sophisticated science teachers,” said Boger, who spearheaded construction of OSU’s $7-million satellite school studio. “We are working to improve the quality of education in remote areas. Without something like this, they’re denied an equal educational opportunity with the rest of the country.”

Educator, Entertainer

Wohlert’s German class is not only the granddaddy of satellite TV courses but also, quite possibly, one of the most innovative. He spices up the twice-weekly lectures with rock videos and commercials taken from German television and also fills in his students on the latest German news and weather reports.

Each show features a different host school whose students either travel to Stillwater to watch Wohlert live or talk back and forth with their teacher over an open telephone line. WATS lines allow students from other schools to call in and ask questions. Each remote class is supervised by a teacher or parent, but they need not be certified to teach German. Tests are mailed into OSU for grading.

The video portion of the class is supplemented by three hours of computerized language laboratory work. Using programs developed by Wohlert, students run through vocabulary and sentence structure exercises on their school or home computers. One program links the computer with a microphone device. The student talks into the microphone and his pronunciation is analyzed and rated.

Wohlert, a warm and vivacious German immigrant, seems to be a big hit with his students. They write him letters, send pictures of themselves and regularly implore him to come to proms and graduations. And, apparently, youngsters are not the only ones who tune in. Wohlert says he frequently gets mail from senior citizens who pirate the show’s unscrambled signal with their own home satellite dishes.

“I can’t tell you how bright some of my students are,” Wohlert said. “Some of these talents would be lost if we didn’t give them this opportunity.”

The students here in Plevna could not agree more. The high school has seven teachers on the faculty, but has not had a foreign language teacher on staff in years. That was really frustrating to Jay Schumacher, a senior with an A-minus average who hopes to win an appointment to either West Point or the Air Force Academy.

“I really needed foreign language for college,” said Schumacher. “This helps me a lot to be able to put it on my transcript.”

Four students are signed up for Wohlert’s class, but Ronda Higgins, a senior, and junior Denise Maire had to miss class the other day when they were away at a future homemakers convention. No problem. Bailey, who supervises the class, videotaped it so the two girls could watch Wohlert at home.

Next term, Bailey said, the science class might start tuning in to some of OSU’s physics lectures. And, next year, depending on the whims of some of the current crop of sophomores and juniors, Bailey said the school could switch to the TI-IN network in San Antonio that offers French.

Satellite educators predict that, some day soon, schools will be doing lots of such channel switching. “Eventually,” suggested Marshall Allen, director of educational television services at OSU, “schools will go out and pick and choose--cherry-pick their classes. For a simple expenditure of $2,000 to $3,000 they can get access to 100 different choices. They might want to take a computer class out of California and Japanese out of somewhere else and physics out of here.”

For-Profit Enterprise

The TI-IN network, a for-profit corporation, was designed to tap that new market. The network has its own faculty and uses four different satellite channels to transmit such advanced high school courses as linear programming, calculus, statistics and trigonometry. For an average $18,000 start-up fee, the firm not only provides programming but also installs the satellite dish, monitors and other communications equipment a school needs. The package includes a printer which spews out announcements, notes and tests for the students.

For his classes, David Benke is not only the computer science and advanced math teacher but also the sound and camera operator. He sits at a small console which controls stationary cameras trained on him and on a large writing tablet that substitutes for a blackboard. His linear algebra class includes two students in Vermont, one in Kansas, one in Iowa and nine in Texas--all of whom can talk to Benke through open speaker-phones.

“What we’re going to be doing today is looking at vectors,” Benke told his students at the beginning of a recent class as he drew lines with his right hand and switched cameras with his left. “Let me see if I can hear from Peggy in East Menoma and Bernie in Farmersville today.” Both Peggy and Bernie called in with questions.

Diane Parker, TI-IN’s art history teacher, said the television class enables her to do things she could never do in a more traditional setting. Combining videotapes with live segments, she spiced up a recent lecture on Egyptology by making herself disappear in a puff of smoke from the screen then reappear as Cleopatra to take questions about Egyptian art from students.

“In education today we have to be entertainers,” said Parker. “The kids don’t want just dry facts, names, dates and places; they want it to come to life.”

Some video teachers admit they have a little trouble adapting to the new technology, but most say they eventually get the hang of it. Joe Clemenson is a calculus teacher in tiny Princeton, Minn., where the high school shares courses with six other schools in a 50-mile radius over a cable network.

In his first hour class, Clemenson has seven students from Princeton, 10 students from Pine City, 50 miles away, and two students from Milaca, 15 miles away. There are three cameras in the classroom--one trained on Clemenson, one on his Princeton students and one in the ceiling aimed at his writing tablet.

The other classrooms in the other schools are outfitted the same way. That means that the cameras trained on the students in those classrooms allow him to see their faces in a bank of monitors above his head.

“It works just as well as a regular classroom,” Clemenson said, “Except that I see some of my students hanging from the ceiling.”