Bridging the digital divide, one household at a time

Mother and daughter share the machine, with an hour set aside for each.

One hour for 4-year-old Gyneece, who plays the computer keyboard like a piano, learning the look of the letters on screen. One hour for her mother, Natalie, who's building her vocabulary, editing her résumé and wading through job listings online.

"It's like a phone book, a dictionary, the newspaper," said Natalie Davis, a single mother looking for work. "It's going to save me a lot in time and resources."

Davis is one of 252 parents to benefit so far from a new statewide plan to boost student achievement by giving a computer to every low-income family with children in school. The concept is simple: Social-service agencies refer the clients, businesses donate the computers and schools train students to refurbish the machines.

The Wilderness Technology Alliance (WTA), which created the model, already has taken it across the country to Maryland, where a similar program is expected to start this month. The nonprofit group also is talking with education officials in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Virginia.

"The only thing holding us back is the number of computers we can get through the door," said Lou August, founder of the Redmond-based group.

For years now, the WTA has been on a mission: Teach students to refurbish computers, then send the computers to the people who need them most. The group's work with schools has been celebrated twice by the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, which has documented WTA programs as part of its history of the computer revolution.

But with computers in nearly every classroom now, the WTA focus has shifted to the home, where a digital divide puts low-income students at a distinct disadvantage.

A former supplier of computers to schools, August said he has seen firsthand how students from low-income families lose ground without technology.

"If students don't have this tool in their homes, they are severely handicapped," said August.

From its humble headquarters in a Redmond office park, the WTA has managed to get the support of some major players in the state, from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to King County Executive Ron Sims, who sits on the board of directors.

The King County Housing Authority, the state's unemployment office and the federally funded preschool program Head Start all refer clients to the program. Corel Corp. just donated about $6 million of software to the project. And Bellevue Community College (BCC) has made the WTA's project an integral part of its service-learning program.

The WTA runs on the strength of volunteers, with only one paid employee, and operating costs of about $1,500 a month. Those costs are paid through the price of the tutorials parents are required to take.

Parents have the option of taking a two-hour, $49 class, at the end of which they will receive a free Pentium II computer; or a four-hour, $99 class, which leads to a free Pentium III computer. All computers come with Internet capability, Windows 98 and Word Perfect Office Suite 11.

In the past several weeks, BCC students have worked in the office doing everything from stacking computer monitors to refurbishing machines to calling schools to coordinating dropoffs of computers.

Rudolph Helm, chairman of the Technical Support program at BCC, said the experience is invaluable for his students. It is a luxury, he said, to be able to drop in on a working enterprise.

"They get to go out and ply their trade," said Helm. "When students can go out and practice what they're learning in the classroom, it doesn't get more powerful than that."

The WTA began several years ago with the modest goal of giving character education and jobs training to children in the highest-poverty high schools. After a three- to five-day hike in the wilderness, the children were treated to a course on how to refurbish computers. The students would then place the computers in their own classrooms or give them to peers who could not otherwise afford them.

The classes became fixtures at high-poverty high schools from Spokane to Olympia, giving students job training even as they provided computers to the people who needed them most.

At Chief Leschi High School in Puyallup, a tribal school where more than 70 percent of students receive a free or reduced-price lunch, the computer-refurbishing class has thrived. Will Fry, a computer-science and social-studies teacher, said the program has pulled some students into schoolwork in a way they never had imagined.

Many of his students are in special education, he said; nearly all of them have taken to the hands-on work.

"I can't get them away from the computer lab, to be honest with you," said Fry, who requires the students to create a business plan as part of the course. "For the most part, those kids have changed the way they looked at school and the opportunities made available to them."

As part of every business plan, students can give a computer to someone in need of the resource, Fry said. One gift went to a teenage mother, who used the computer to complete her high-school education from home.

In the past, students in Fry's program have refurbished computers for the elderly, then taught the seniors how to use them. Now, they are likely to do the same thing for low-income parents, who will pay a small fee for the student-taught computer lesson.

Nate Alden, an intern from BCC, recently led a tutorial with the help of a bilingual parent, who translated his instructions to another Spanish-speaking client. Alden said lessons are crucial for new users, easily intimidated by machines.

For his part, Alden found that it was surprisingly hard to run a class, and the experience gave him a sense of how tough a career in tech support could be. Alden said he needed to work on pacing and patience.

"There was one point where, I admit, I kind of rushed the students," said Alden, 25, who hopes to graduate from BCC this spring. "You can't force a student to move too quickly."

Weeks after the tutorial, Davis and her daughter are finding their way around the computer on their own. Sometimes Gyneece will bring a skill home from preschool and teach it to her mother. Other times, Davis will show her daughter what she found during her own time on the machine.

Apart from the job hunt, Davis is using the computer to develop her "vocabulary and reading comprehension." An orphan who grew up in a housing project, Davis had little formal education. Her hope is to use the computer to learn more.

"I raised myself, taught myself, no one put me through schools," said Davis, who is aiming for a job in social services. "I did good, but I can do better."

Cara Solomon: 206-464-2024 or csolomon@seattletimes.com