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In the last 4 years, leaders of the Carrollton City School District have attracted tremendous funding and technical support for their plans to introduce technology into the school system. Telecommunications, Inc. (TCI) has contributed in excess of $1 million; IBM and the IBM Foundation have contributed nearly $1 million; local businesses such as Southwire Company, Citizens Bank and Trust, Georgia Power, Southern Bell, Sony Music, Inc., and Peachtree Cable, Inc. have provided grants of $500 to $50,000 and helped to train teachers. The state of Georgia has contributed a grant of $820,000 from a part of the Universal Service Fund created by Senate Bill 144, which took Southern Bell overcharges that would normally be refunded in small checks to consumers and created a $50 million fund to build a telecommunications infrastructure for medicine and education in Georgia.
How did the Carrollton City School District leadership attract all the support? Not by demonstrating a need any more acute than its fellow districts in the state. With three schools and 3,504 K-12 students, the Carrollton City School District looks pretty average from a purely statistical point of view. But the district leadership is light-years ahead of many when it comes to choosing a direction, galvanizing support for its goal, and finding ways to secure funding.
In 1984, school district administrators decided to get the entire community involved in determining the direction of education in Carrollton City. Since then, more than 300 members of the community have participated in articulating a vision for education, including a vision to create a community network that connects West Georgia College, libraries, Tanner Medical Center, county agencies, private homes, and the school system. To turn that vision into reality, the district initiated a series of events to market the vision to the full community and build support and momentum for it.
It invited prominent leaders from local government, business, the clergy, and education to talk about the district's vision for networking and how to finance it. Clear support from the city council, the mayor, the school board, and business followed. TCI identified Carrollton High School as its first National Showcase School and provided a video headend and cable to all school sites. IBM loaned every teacher a computer for a year and helped arrange long-term financing for a building-wide network that included eight file servers and 275 computer work stations, seven in every classroom. The district even got voters to approve a bond issuance to build a new school with all the state-of-the-art technology in place and, by redefining classrooms as "academic labs," was able to increase state funding by 20 percent.
But beyond the joint problem solving and funding that followed, the district has achieved an important intangible that will help it maintain the system-currently a $600,000-a-year proposition. The high level of community involvement has created commitment to a shared vision of education and accountability outside the school and administration walls. This awareness continues to inspire creative ways of funding the system. (One idea currently under consideration, for example, is to sell file server access to the local cable company, which would then resell the access to households.)
With a decrease in the drop-out rate from 19 percent to just under 5 percent in 5 years, it appears that the community's efforts to create a more active and engaging learning environment through technology are paying off. The Carrollton City School District leadership and the community should feel encouraged that together they are taking the district in the right direction.