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To: Dennis P who wrote (15010)	5/30/1999 10:28:00 PM
From: Mark S. Schroeder	Respond to of 19109

An Internet promise goes unfulfilled WASHINGTON - The initiative was launched with great fanfare: The Council of the Great City Schools announced an alliance with MCI and Total Multimedia Inc. to hardwire the 50 largest urban school districts to the Internet. "For inner-city America and for our kids, they are too often the last to be served by any new emerging technology or service," council head Michael Casserly told USA TODAY. That was in August 1994. The "benchmark initiative" - as the council described it - was to start the process that creates the National Urban Learning Network. But the man pushing the initiative, Taylor Kramer of the '70s rock group Iron Butterfly, literally disappeared soon afterward. And now, nothing has happened to make the goal come to pass. The story is a lesson in how even the best of intentions in technology can fall by the wayside without proper vigilance. "I think the landscape in school technology is littered with an incredible array of programs that had great intentions but lack the juice or implementation," Casserly says. "You would kind of expect with a field that is less than 20 years old and as big as this one is, you're going to have a lot of things that really make it and lots of things that fail," he says. Kramer had approached Casserly with the promise to provide technology and high-tech assistance through his California video technology firm Total Multimedia. He had founded TMM along with Randy Jackson, the youngest Jackson in the Jackson 5. TMM had established a track record in its use of high-tech equipment in schools. Headquartered in Thousand Oaks, Calif., TMM had teamed up with the nearby Hueneme Elementary School District in 1985 to outfit all of its 11 schools. With the alliance, the MCI foundation was to contribute $100,000, while the corporation made available the resources it has as an international telecommunications carrier. The council was to start the network with one high school in the cities of Nashville, St. Louis, Portland, Ore., Detroit, San Diego, Baltimore and Boston. Months after the announcement, the council sponsored a design meeting in Portland, Ore., at Marshall High School, to demonstrate the initiative to prospective donors representing nearly 40 corporations. Marshall principal Colin Karr-Morse remembers the promises but says, "We kind of dropped out of that because nothing was happening. We get into an awful lot of meetings where people have really neat ideas and don't follow through. We just decided we're going to do our own thing." Casserly's plan was to eventually connect all 50 urban school districts with their 5.5 million children - typically America's neediest youth - to the country's evolving information highways to improve the quality of instruction. Besides the disappearance of Kramer, Casserly says the urban network also failed to receive a $291,374 grant from the Department of Commerce. "We had thought that the project really jived with their priorities, but they ended up not funding it." Other corporations were to kick in $1.2 million. "We were disappointed that it was so slow, and the talk preceded the money, and the money never came," says Karr-Morse, noting the school was able to finance a technology project with local corporate help and a hefty bond issue. "Urban schools still are about half as likely to be wired to the Internet as the national average," Casserly says. For the 50 districts represented by the council, he says the range is about 10% to 80% of their schools, with some schools having only the principal's office wired or the library but not every classroom. By Tamara Henry, USA TODAY