School Computers Are Campaign’s Goal : Education: Students’ access to technology must be boosted dramatically, coalition says.

By the turn of the century, students in every classroom in Los Angeles County will be able to send e-mail across the world if a new coalition of business, charitable and educational leaders meets goals that it announced on Tuesday.

In addition, half of the county’s 60,000 teachers will have the training and equipment to use computers as everyday, if sophisticated, instructional tools.

Leaders of the newly formed Technology for Learning Collaborative said they want Los Angeles to be a national leader, instead of a laggard, in terms of students’ access to computers.

The stakes, as well as the odds against succeeding, are high primarily because of the huge cost of hardware and training but also because schools’ more basic needs are already being neglected.

California’s annual per-pupil spending on technology is less than the cost of a Big Mac, fries and a Coke, while other states spend $150 or more per student. And the new coalition does not promise any new resources to fill in for that gap.

But what the effort--billed as the largest such technology campaign ever undertaken in a major metropolitan area--lacks in new resources, it makes up in enthusiasm and the high-profile positions of many of its participants.

“The stakes here are enormous, for our children and our economy,” said Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, whose educational foundation will participate in the program. “Five years from now, we will share a tremendous sense of pride.”

The coalition was organized by the Los Angeles County Office of Education and includes companies such as Apple Computer, IBM, Pacific Bell, GTE and the Los Angeles Times.

At a kickoff conference at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion Downtown, the county office announced that it is surveying 1,600 schools to determine what hardware, software and training they need. Already, the survey is showing that some schools have yet to begin thinking about technology, some are just getting going and a few are already on-line, allowing students to research papers on the Internet as easily as opening an encyclopedia.

A survey by the Los Angeles Educational Partnership, which has computerized two public schools it is using as educational research laboratories, found that three-quarters of the computers used in county schools are obsolete and incapable of running current educational software. Fewer than one in 30 teachers can get to a computer equipped with a modem.

Coalition organizers hope they will be able to head off a growing gap between technology “haves” and “have-nots” in schools. Not all of the schools leading the pack are in wealthier areas, and schools in more affluent areas say they often lose out to schools in poorer areas in the competition for corporate donations and foundation grants.

That competition, several panelists said, is destructive. “Unless we overcome competition, a few people will have wonderful programs and the rest will have awful ones,” said Mary Odell, president of the Riordan Foundation, set up by the mayor in 1981 to provide computer-assisted literacy programs to elementary schools.

Even before the computers are in place, several conference participants said, teachers will have to be trained and new curricula developed to make them useful. Computers are most worthwhile when they are used to enhance the central missions of education--reading, mathematics and problem solving, said Gilbert G. Mara, a teacher at Yukon Intermediate School in Hawthorne.

Mara’s students demonstrated Tuesday how they already use the Internet to communicate with pen pals across the globe--among them a girl in Egypt who has pyramids in her back yard and a girl in Malaysia who attends school on Saturdays and Sundays.

“Kids do need the technical knowledge to walk up to a computer and operate it as easily as we do our cars,” he said.

But, he said, unless a teacher takes control of how computers are used, the Internet can be a waste of time. “The struggle is to not be swallowed up by all of this,” he said.

It is not just computers, printers and monitors that the schools are lacking, said Gwen Gross, superintendent of the Hermosa Beach school district. Buildings need to be renovated, electrical wiring needs to be upgraded and high-speed data transmission lines need to be installed. “Until we have the funds to support the renovation and the massive overhaul of our sites, we’re not going to be able to address the bigger issue of having computers in our schools,” she said.

Not everyone in the state is convinced of the utility or even the advisability of computers, said state Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin, who addressed the conference.

She noted that a proposed $500-million bond issue for computers in the schools was defeated on a partisan vote by the state Assembly’s Education Committee, after a Republican legislative analysis concluded that kids using computers incur “actual physiological damage” to the brain.

Eastin urged those attending the conference to contact legislators of both parties to tell them that spending money on technology is “not only not too expensive to do, it’s essential to do.”