High School Gets Wired Thanks to Parent Volunteers

Corporate headhunters and plumbers, computer systems engineers and school administrators clambered up ladders and cut cable Saturday at Simi Valley’s Santa Susana High as part of a second Netday ’96.

“I had access to 10-foot-high ladders, so that’s why I’m here,” said a grinning Kevin Proctor as he fed cables through ceiling panels. He has a daughter in the ninth grade at the technology and performing arts magnet school.

Last spring, about 200 volunteers turned out to wire more than two dozen Ventura County schools to the Internet as part of the inaugural statewide effort.

Santa Susana was one of the schools that got wired this go-round. On Saturday, about 30 people showed up at Santa Susana in an effort to lay 16,000 feet of cable to the school’s more than 115 computers in about 50 classrooms.

“We’re trying to network [the computers] all together so we can send e-mail back and forth, so we can have access to the Internet . . . basically bringing us up to the 21st century technologically,” said school program director Judy Cannings.

The school district spent about $10,000 on the cable, and two high-tech companies donated tens of thousands of dollars worth of other equipment. Parents and other volunteers supplied the muscle.

“My wife volunteered me, but I think it’s really important to move things along technologically,” said Forrest Hall, 36, an electrician at Warner Bros. and a Star Trek fan. “It’s about giving the kids here a jump, a kick start. I would have killed for opportunities like this.”

It is expected that a couple more Saturdays of labor will be required to finish the job. But when complete, the school will be only the second among the 25 in the Simi Valley Unified School District to be fully wired.

Countywide, 139 school and administrative sites are connected to the Internet. The goal is to have all 184 public schools connected by June 30, 1998.

“There’s an awful lot of people who complain about how bad our schools are,” said parent volunteer Don Speth. “If you want to improve them you’ve got to get involved.”

Cannings foresees a day when Australian professors will teach classes at the school via technology as easily as students at different ends of the school talk to each other via computer.

“The biggest thing is our access to the outside world and our access to experts we would never get,” she said, wearing a T-shirt adorned with the words “I connected our kids to the future.”