THEY CONNECTED BOSTON'S SCHOOLS TO ITS FUTURE

Author: BY DAVID NYHAN, GLOBE STAFF 
Date: 06/11/2000 Page: E4 Section: Focus 

DAVID NYHAN WHEN US COMMERCE SECRETARY BILL DALEY STANDS UP WEDNESDAY TO PROCLAIM BOSTON AS THE ``CITY ON THE HILL'' FOR THE TECHNOLOGY REVOLUTION, HE CAN FAIRLY CLAIM: ``WHEN IT COMES TO
CLOSING THE DIGITAL DIVIDE, BOSTON IS A MODEL CITY.''

It didn't look anything like that in January 1996, when Mayor Tom Menino gave his State of the City speech from the Jeremiah Burke High School, which had lost its accreditation and symbolized the accumulated failures of a city that had shortchanged its students for decades.

That day Menino asked that he be judged on how far he could take the Boston public schools. He's nowhere near done yet, but remarkable strides have been made, and Menino had a lot of help.

Ed DeMore, 54, a Beacon Hill resident who'd made his money in D & S Resource Group Inc., was galvanized by Menino's bold commitment and signed on to help. A remarkable number of favorable developments fell into place, some due to luck, some owing to the altruism of successful technology developers, and some due to old-fashioned arm-twisting.

The city kicked in $50 million, the federal government forked over $50 million, and another $20 million came from the private sector. Mike Monahan of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers brought in union electricians to wire the city's schools, gratis.
"In hindsight," DeMore said Friday, "it was like connecting the dots - only we didn't realize it at the time." Perhaps most heartening was the eagerness of companies headquartered far from Boston to embrace the city's cause as their own - and donate expensive equipment to the cause.

"Boston has a small, but stable, inner-city school system," said DeMore. "But the city has a big-time image. And these people became convinced that if you can win here, you can win everywhere."

Invoking the mayor's clout and commitment, DeMore formed the Boston Digital Bridge Foundation, based upon five chief executive officers who became instrumental in the progress our city schools have made.

Echo Tsai is CEO of HiQ Computers, a California-based company. She came to the United States from Taiwan with no money, and started a company with her brother. "She's adopted Boston as the place where she will pay the country back for being a classic immigrant success story," said DeMore.

John Keane of Boston's Keane Inc., a local high-tech company, was quick to realize the potential untapped in Boston schoolkids. Chuck Longfield, CEO of Target Software in Cambridge, "grew up in a three-decker in East Boston, went to Boston Latin and then Harvard, the first kid in his family to get to college," said Demore. Ken Umansky, head of the technology group and a partner at Arnold Communications, is a specialist in high-tech development. Nish Sonwalkar, director of the hyper-media project at MIT and CEO of Intelligent Software Systems Inc., rounded out the five.

With these sorts of industry connections, the foundation got to work. The latest project is the successful recruitment of 27 low-income families, who took 12 weeks of intensive computer training. Each family had to complete a computer project. Then they got a free computer.

"These people now really have the skills," said DeMore. "The key is the training, not the computer." Those families are now successfully launched on the info highway.

Daley comes to Boston because Beantown was the first large urban school district in the country to put computer networks in every one of 130 school buildings.

When Menino made his pledge at the Burke School, there was only one computer for every 790 Boston students, DeMore said. "He committed to one machine for every four students, and to high-speed networks. By October of '98 we had high-speed networks, and today we have one computer for every six students. In addition, half of all the teachers have been trained, and been given computers. Giving the computer is the easy part; the training is the hard part."

Thanks to a gift from HiQ Computers, 1,000 new machines were made available for the Boston programs. To DeMore, this is the future of job creation in Massachusetts. "We want to create a technical academy for a higher level of learning, where these kids can meet each other, learn to network, see how you climb the ladder of success. To create the workers we need, this is the only thing on the horizon."

Given top-level support at City Hall, the computer program went on the fast track through all the levels of municipal bureaucracy, which is a small miracle in itself. "This is a classic bridging of the haves and the have-nots," said DeMore. "This is not just a handout, where someone gives you a check and says `good luck.' We are a tribal city, a neighborhood and parochial city, but our dream is we all come together around this notion of networked schools in a high-tech Boston."

Today there are 700 Boston high school students taking courses in Web design, Microsoft-certified training programs, learning how to run servers, or specializing in desktop operation, or robotics, or network design.

Some of these kids who need to get to work are moving into jobs that pay $30,000 and $40,000 per year, right out of high school. DeMore says that, in one case, a Boston Latin student is earning $65 a hour designing Web pages.

There are a lot of kids with a lot of talent tucked away in the Boston public schools. With a lot of digging - and a little polishing, of the type the foundation engages in - these kids can flourish.

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