These are a few of the events that have happened while my son has attended the Clinton County School system. During his Sophomore year he had an introductory class in Biology. During the entire class he never touched a microscope, never went on a field trip, never did an experiment, and never dissected a plant or animal. During a school open house I asked his teacher about this situation. She said that there simply wasn't money available for field trips and lab supplies. I did not mention to her that due to the passage of the Kentucky Education Reform Act two years earlier the annual budget of the county school system had increased from $5 million dollars to $8 million dollars. I simply pointed out that we live in a rural area and the High School is located about one mile out of town and is surrounded by fields and is at the base of a mountain covered with appalachian hardwood forests. I said that when I had taught environmental education for elementary teachers in a local college twenty years before, I had encouraged the teachers to make use of such resources. "After all," I said, "you are teaching biology and you are surrounded by biology. If you can't afford lab supplies, use specimens from the real world." "Oh no," she said, "we couldn't do that. The specimens wouldn't be prepared and wouldn't be sanitary. We are only allowed to use prepared specimens purchased from a school supply company." She didn't say why they couldn't at least walk through the forest and look at biology. During his senior year in a World History class while studying the Middle East, the teacher spent an entire class period talking about the Sermon on the Mount. She ended the class by telling about her experience in being saved, begging each of the students to accept Jesus Christ as their savior, and telling them that they were each damned to hell if they did not. My son said that she got so emotional she was almost in tears by the time she finished. It has been common throughout his school career for my son to have a goof off time whenever his regular teacher is absent and the class is taught by a substitute teacher. That is, except in his seventh grade classes. Then, sometimes, a substitute teacher could not be found and the school principal would act as substitute teacher. Whenever this occurred, the principal would take the opportunity to spend the class teaching the children about the bible regardless of the class subject. His senior class had a fund raiser in which they sold magazines. The class sponsors had determined that if each child sold something like $200 worth of magazines the class would get about $50 or so and this would meet their fund raising goal. Since my son had heard me rail against school fund raising in which an outside company got a part of the proceeds he asked about the possibility of any parents who wanted simply donating $50 to the class instead of the child selling the magazines. He was told that the school was not allowed to accept donations but could only get money by selling products or services. At the start of an introductory chemistry class taught by a teacher with a reputation as one of the most progressive in the school my son was told that they would be doing a lot of experiments. In the first month they did three or four, but no more after that. When I asked the teacher why they didn't do more he said that he wanted to but he felt the kids couldn't benefit properly from the experiments until they got the necessary basic knowledge in chemistry and that the class had proved to be so ill prepared and so slow to learn that he had never felt that they had obtained the necessary level of knowledge. He had not had time to teach them what they needed to know and to do experiments as well. My son generally gets A's in his classes with an occasional B. A recent semester report card showed that his grade point average on a 4 point scale was 3.77 which would be pretty good most places. However, his report card also showed that on GPA he ranked 15th in his class of 86. That means that 20% of the students had better than a 3.77 GPA. Does this mean that the students are awfully smart or that grades have little meaning? The area where we live is a two to three hour drive from any large towns with universities and other such resources. As a result trips to these areas are sometimes planned for visits to museums, art shows, and various other activities. A recent trip to Western Kentucky University for Science Day is typical. The students left at 6 am and did not return until 5 pm. The trip is a two hour drive one way and lunch takes one hour leaving six hours for the science exhibits. My son said there were a number of science demonstrations, exhibits, and programs being repeated throughout the campus all day. He and his friend had attended three by noon and were looking forward to more in the afternoon. Instead the teachers in charge decided that the students should spend the afternoon shopping in a nearby mall. The entire two busloads of children spent over three hours of their trip at the mall rather than attending the science fair. This is common of most such trips. I remember one trip a few years ago to the Oak Ridge National laboratory which is about a three hour drive away. The kids were gone twelve hours but only spent two hours at the laboratory. The rest was spent traveling, eating and shopping. The school system brags about the number of computers and the computer lab they have now. The problem is that, at least at the high school, they only have two programs generally available for the students. One of these is Microsoft Works and the other is Knowledge Master which is a drill on trivia questions to help the academic team practice. A few teachers do have a few additional programs set up on computers in their individual rooms but they are not widely used by the student body. There are no computerized research resources such as CD ROM based information. No educational simulations such as Sim City. No access to on line computer resources elsewhere, at least none in use. I understand that they have an employee monitor in the computer lab to continually watch over the students shoulders and make sure they don't push any buttons that the monitor doesn't understand. They are allowed to use computers only for word processing, spreadsheets, and trivia drills. They are discouraged from trying to learn more about computers than the teachers know. In 1991 I invited the School Superintendent to my house to take part in a worldwide on line education conference sponsored by the education forum on Compuserve. Later I got the middle school librarian and two or three teachers from there to come out to look at encylopedias and other reference materials on CD ROM, some simulation type programs, my Tutor program and a number of others as well as online access. They seemed impressed. The Superintendent then asked me to look into the use of technology in the schools and to advise him on technology implementation with a view to my becoming technology coordinator. Later he told me that a few teachers complained about his asking me to do this. He said they thought that they knew enough about computers that they and not some outsider should be advising him and should get that job. So that was the end of my advice to the schools. I had advised him to set up modems, reference CD ROMs, and online access in all school libraries, to make computers available to students somehow after school and on weekends, possibly to get laptops that students could check out to take home. I asked him to make available not only WP, spreadsheets, etc. but typing tutors, the Miracle Piano system, flight simulator, Sim City 2000 and a number of other simulators. I also discussed starting with a small group of very interested teachers and getting them extremely proficient in use of all this and letting them teach others until 60 to 80 percent of all the teachers were highly efficient in using computers as instructional aides. We also discussed use of other technology such as video cameras with school projects to make movies of local historical interest and interviews of older citizens and a number of other ideas. I also suggested that the new middle school building which was then in the planning stages should be wired with fiber optic cable as it was built to make computer networks cheaper to install. He said that that would be too expensive because the school board was trying to find money to increase the seating capacity of the gym. The things I suggested have not been implemented yet and I wonder if they ever will be. October 16, 1995