By PAUL WESTMOORE ngedit@niagara-gazette.com
Though Niagara Falls may be one of the state’s poorest school districts, it has recently become one of the elite when it comes to 21st Century technology.
In the last month, the district completed a $6 5 million technology project which made it only the sixth school system in the state to have installed 61⁄2-foot interactive SMART Boards along with Red Cat audio enhancement systems and document cameras in all of its 448 classrooms.
Administrator for Information Services Darlene Sprague said the other five school districts to have these very large computerized systems districtwide are: Binghamton, New Rochelle, Massapequa, East Chester and the New York City Department of Education. The state has more than 700 public school districts.
Sprague said if other school districts have installed other brands of interactive white boards — the generic name for that technology — in all their classrooms, she hasn’t heard of it.
The first phase of the project started more than three years ago with the construction of the $25 million Niagara Street Elementary School in which SMART Boards and the other technology were installed in all 35 classrooms. The school opened in September 2007.
Phase II which was just completed saw 413 SMART Boards, Red Cats and document cameras installed in the district’s 11 other schools including LaSalle and Gaskill Preparatory schools, the Community Education Center on 60th Street and Niagara Falls High School. That phase, which started last June, involved placing the new technology in seven elementary and the prep schools last summer and ended with the installations at the high school during the fall and winter, Operations and Maintenance Supervisor and Capital Project Manager Lawrence Beyer said.
“We still have a little work to do,” Beyer said. “We are waiting for our contractor to deliver the six cables we need to hook up the document cameras to the SMART Boards in six classrooms at Niagara Falls High School. As soon as they come in we’ll have that done. Otherwise, everything is up and running. Now we’re going around doing punch list checks to make sure everything is working right.”
It appears the district obtained the technology at a bargain rate.
Initially school officials and their consultants estimated the SMART Boards and other technology in Phase II would cost about $8.34 million. But C. Earl Smeal, district energy and assistant capital project manager, said, “The district saved a lot of money by purchasing everything through state contract (which purchases large items for public entities statewide) instead of bidding it out and paying the markup price you’d normally get charged for by the successful (local) bidder.” The actual cost came to $6,508,827.
The bonus to local property owners is there was no impact on the tax rate because the state will reimburse the district for 98 percent of the cost and the local share of about $195,000 is covered by the $6.2 million in Expanding Our Children’s Education and Learning funds the schools are entitled to from the state, Beyer said. Only about $400,000 EXCEL dollars have been spent on district capital projects so far.
Superintendent Cynthia A. Bianco said the remaining $5.8 million in EXCEL money will be used to help pay the local share of future capital improvements.
And while it’s nice to brag about all the district’s “wonderful technology,” Bianco said, “This isn’t about the sizzle. It’s about giving our teachers better tools to help children learn. And because we are a poor district, the new technology levels the playing field a little for our kids and gives them a leg up on learning” because they don’t have a lot of technology at home like kids from more affluent school districts do.
Bianco added she thinks students are more attentive in class when there’s better technology.
“There is an increased interaction among student, teacher and technology in the classroom which changes the dynamics. It engages the kids and makes instruction more meaningful,” she said. “It helps them learn because instead of just listening to a teacher in front of the room, they become more actively involved in their own learning (because they are) so attracted to the new technology.”
Sprague said, “Research shows that kids with an interactive board in the classroom” pay more attention in the classroom and do better.
She said this is exemplified at Niagara Street School.
“The first year I was over there I saw a teacher ask a question and every kid’s arm shot up because they wanted to go up to the board and give the answer,” she said.
Niagara Street Principal Paulette Pierce said the new technology helps because “SMART Boards are multisensory. They give a child opportunities to see something, hear something and touch something” when they are involved in a subject.
The SMART Board acts like a giant computer that can instantly bring up information, visuals and sounds about any subject matter. Pierce noted the boards can actually be manipulated (by the students) right on the screen with a dry marker or their fingers. It provides children with the opportunity to learn in many different ways, receiving information and working with it.
“If they are studying about the world, for example, they can move the names of countries, states and capitals to the correct location on a map. The SMART Board can open up the whole world for a child within seconds. It’s like using the Internet,” Pierce said. “Our goal is to try every single way to teach by using one strategy after another until each student is able to learn. The SMART Board opens up all kinds of opportunities for us to do that.”
Sprague and Bianco said the Red Cats and document cameras also enhance the system’s effectiveness.
“The document cameras let the teacher put up anything like papers, pictures or even a student’s work on the board instantly so the class can discuss what they are working on in real time,” she said.
Bianco said the Red Cats, an amplifier system, has a speaker that’s worn around a teacher’s neck and sends the sound of what’s being said evenly around a classroom.
“But it’s not enough for kids to hear. Volume is not the issue,” Bianco said. “It’s the enunciation, pronunciation and the phonetical hearing of sounds that a kid tends to miss that’s really important. It really helps them with reading because it distributes that sound evenly so every student can hear exactly what is being said and how it should sound.”
