Access Lab @ Daphne High School

The access classroom at Daphne High school was set up very nice. I was surprised by the up to date technology that the access lab offered. I met with Joseph Roh who was in charge of the IB program. Mr. Roh had inherited the access lab from someone else that wrote the grant to get the lab started. Mr. Roh had some favorable things to say about the lab but also stated there were many logistical problems with the lab. The IVC part of Access / the video part was not being used this semester and may not be used for second semester. The only part of Access that was being used was web classes. Mr. Roh stated that only classes that were not offered to students could be used for IVC. So if a student wants to take chemistry II and there is not a teacher or class offered the student could use Access to join in with other classes. A teacher from Daphne could take his or her class in the IVC lab and other students could join in at other schools. So a teacher can have class in the Access lab and link with a high school anywhere in the state provided that the school has a access lab. The teachers may only have a total of thirty students in a lab. Mr. Roh said that one of his teachers was curious about how he was gonna give test using IVC. This presents a problem of how to get the test back to the instructor. The access lab will be o.k Mr. Roh stated if the state alots a teacher to be in charge of the classroom. Someone who can handle scheduling classes the technical problems that come up and handling updates. One way for it to fail is to add the access lab to a teacher who may already have four or five things to deal with in a day. Then ex spect the teacher to run it like someone who is total devoted only to the lab. It seems like a great idea but at the cost of $85,000 to $95,000 a school why not put in new computers in steed. In 2009 the state has mandated that all freshman from this point forward be required to take a least one on line class. Daphne usually have some where around 300 to 400 new freshmen a year. Daphne has about 30 lab top computers and around 30 regular computers. They are on the block system as are most high school meaning 4 blocks aday. Do the math with these few computers how will this get done? Mr. Roh stated that often time the government example No Child Left Behind and local state governments put these mandates in place without providing any money to carry them out and schools are left holding the bag. Mr. Roh stated that they would somehow find the money but it would be a struggal. So in my opinion the access lab is a great idea, but maybe instead of always coming up with the next big idea we should concrete on making what we have now work and figure out how to pay for these ideas before we implement programs on schools that may be able to pay for them or may not.