CALCULATED OPPORTUNITY

Bill Gehling, the superintendent of the Powers School District in Powers, Ore., is like any educator: He wants what's best for his students, and yet he's hamstrung by the economy, geography and school financing.

“We are remote, rural and economically depressed,” Gehling said. “We are a timber area community, and obviously we have suffered from the cutback in timber production. We're looking for ways to overcome that.”

The high school has 65 students, and the entire K-12 school district counts only 155, making the potential to teach anything more extravagant than reading, writing and arithmetic seemingly as remote as the district's Coos County location.

And yet Powers offers an advanced calculus class that it shares with nearby schools in Reedsport and Myrtle Point, all thanks to a civic-minded resident, the Internet and the power of broadband — not to mention Oregon, which prioritized educational resources for small districts like Gehling's and made it possible to acquire the equipment to take advantage of broadband networks that linked the schools.

“Oregon set up a system to install video telecommunications in each one of the public schools in the state,” Gehling said. “It let us set up a VTEL system and a T-1 transmission line in our school district.”

The district got the equipment because of Jim Adamek, a University of Oregon engineering grad who volunteers two hours each day to teach college-level calculus courses to Powers students. Adamek first started the effort six years ago when his daughter attended Powers.

To get the most of Adamek's experience, Oregon also gave the neighboring Bonanza district telecommunications equipment. “Online classes, video telecommunications and things like that are advantageous to us because of our geography,” Gehling said. “It gives our kids an opportunity to do some things that we would not normally be able to do here — or, in this instance, to offer something to other schools where we happen to have the expertise.”

There is a catch, of course. While the state installed the equipment and serviced a staff to make sure it works, it wants no part in maintaining the broadband connection between the schools, meaning the cost of the T-1 transmission lines must now be assumed by the school district. The schools will simply pool their resources, and — with Powers as a hub — use their network to send out the calculus classes and other online educational information.

“We already had T-1 data lines going into the district, and we have to pay for those,” said Gehling. “We can piggyback onto our data lines, and it won't cost us anything more than we're already paying.”