REANET gets green light from schools

REANET gets green light from schools

Sept. 30, 2000

BY JANELLE HOLDEN
JOURNAL STAFF WRITER

Despite a lack of agreement from the Re-1 school district, a Durango telecommunications corporation has been given a federal grant to implement an area distance-learning project.

This week, the administrators of the Mountain Plains Distance Learning Partnership agreed to provide the company with a $300,000 federal grant as an incentive to build a high-speed infrastructure between area school districts.

In addition, three of the seven educational entities involved verbally agreed to use the company’s telecommunications services once REANET completed a fiber-optics infrastructure between the schools. The three were the Dolores School District, Pueblo Community College, and San Juan Basin Technical School.

Derek Torinus, a sales representative for REANET, said that the verbal agreements were enough to convince the company to connect the Dolores, Mancos, Cortez, and Dove Creek school districts as well as San Juan Technical College, the Adult Education Program and Pueblo Community College with high-speed fiber by next August.

The Mountain Plains Distance Learning Partnership implements the U.S. Department of Education STAR schools’ grants for distance learning and curriculum in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana.

Without the agreement, the grant would have been returned to the federal coffers on Friday, at the end of the federal fiscal year. The grant was given to the partnership three years ago from the STAR schools’ program as a means to jump-start distance learning in Southwest Colorado by Oct. 1.

Once constructed, the highway would connect students and teachers from different districts via special monitors equipped to provide live communication between the schools.

But providing these services isn’t cheap. Each school district must purchase equipment that could cost from $10,000 to $45,000, and agree to pay a monthly service charge estimated at $260 a month to REANET. In addition, REANET is offering to provide other telecommunications services to each district at a competitive rate.

Over the past month, the Re-1 school board has endorsed the idea of distance learning, but has been hesitant to sign a long-term contract for services with REANET.

Leecy Wise, contracted to help train teachers within the partnership, said that the hesitancy of the recent district boards is understandable.

"Because the school districts have not been involved until recently, they felt like this has been a last-minute thing, but the partnership has been in existance for four years," explained Wise.

Torinus said REANET would continue working with the districts that have yet to agree on a contract. "We’ll work over the course of the next few months bringing the various schools in Montezuma and Dolores counties into this agreement between REANET and Mountain Plains," said Torinus.

Ann Miller, director of the Adult Education program, said, "REANET did not come to the school districts; the partnership went to REANET to ask them if they would be interested in providing the service for us, and this $300,000 is just a scratch of what itgoing to cost."

Torinus explained that the agreement does not specifically state that fiber-optics would be constructed between all of the schools. The company may implement copper-wire and wireless technology between some of them.

Darrin Cheney, instructional technologist for the partnership in Wyoming, said providing distance learning for schools would not be an effort to reduce the number of teachers but to provide access for rural schools who need teachers.

"We’ve never proposed that distance education is superior to a regular classroom teaching situation," said Lynn Lee, director of the partnership. He is based in Blanding, and he said Utah has been implementing distance learning in schools for close to 20 years without reducing teacher numbers.

However, he did admit that one of the challenges is coordinating schedules between participating schools.

"There’s challenges in getting faculty to even recognize the advantages because technology is scary to people who are not used to it," Lee said.

"It’s just a matter of being patient and letting people learn, and some of the people here that were the most resistant in the beginning are the leaders now."