As part of the "Kids As Agents of Change" Project, Rogers High School has sought to reinvent teaching and learning. The Project uses technology to create a cross-disciplinary learning environment that emulates the "real world." The keys to Rogers’s impressive and exciting success: a detailed long-term plan, a focus on problem solving with technology-based activities, community service—and a little healthy competition.

Two hundred sixty-two students, ages 14 to 18 in grades 9 through 12, attend Rogers High School in Rogers, Texas, a rural community with a population of 1,131. Farming is still the largest industry in and around Rogers, even though many family farms have shut down because of the depressed farming economy. The school building, bordered by cattle pastures and wild flowers, is thirty minutes from the nearest city.

The "Kids As Agents of Change" Project

Rogers High School was wired for a Local Area Network (LAN) in 1995 and added T1 connectivity in 1996 by means of a U.S. Department of Education Grant. This grant provided the initial funding for the formation of the Central Texas Collaborative, a consortium of university, health, and business partners in addition to representatives from the school, parents, students, local churches, senior citizen groups, and service organizations using federal, state, and foundation grant monies. The Collaborative was formed to improve the quality of life for children and adults in two rural Central Texas communities. It initiated the "Kids As Agents of Change" Project, which uses technology to create a cross-disciplinary learning environment that emulates the "real world." Rogers is now in its fourth year in the Project.

Each classroom at Rogers has at least one Pentium computer. Multimedia projectors, digital cameras, and scanners are available to all students and staff, as are three Internet-connected computer labs of 25 computers each. Many teachers have also received laptops as rewards for superior performance. The school is in the process of installing a full V-TEL Video–conferencing classroom. In addition, each teacher has a considerable budget for supplies and travel experiences.

A Five-Year Plan

The following time line briefly traces the progress of the Project.

Year 1: Information Gathering, Strategic Planning, and Intensive Professional Development. Focus groups met weekly for six months to assess the needs of children and the community. Orienting and supporting the school’s 31 teachers in the change process is a professional development plan that includes:

• a commitment by teachers to at least 60 hours each of professional development a year,
• visits throughout the nation to schools that have overcome great odds to accomplish great things by integrating technology,
• monthly technology training led by university professors, and
• teacher participation in state, national, and international technology conferences.

Year 2: Continued Professional Development, Initial Pilot, and the Search for Funds. Fifteen teachers who had participated in the first year’s training conducted the initial pilot, designing, along with 183 students, team projects on the environment whose research and communication components were primarily technology-based. All teams have competed yearly before university judges in a competition that includes a portfolio and a multimedia presentation. The Collaborative’s leaders are convinced that competition has elevated the student projects to higher levels of excellence. Twenty-seven winning students presented their projects at the International YouthCaN Conference at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Year 3: Project Expansion. In this stage the Project moved beyond environment issues to involving research on real-world problems in all curriculum areas. A total of 330 students, divided into 39 teams of two to four students each from the elementary, middle, and high schools, participated.

Years 4 and 5: Expansion of the Pilot Project into All Classrooms as the Prevalent Method of Teaching and Learning. A major strength of the Project has been the applicability of the research method to all content areas and grade levels. Each student activity has included:

• finding a problem related to the class study and conducting research in the scientific format,
• conducting on-line and off-line research on the hypothesis,
• involving an expert on-line mentor,
• implementing a solution to the problem,
• recruiting a local senior citizen to participate in the research and thus jointly learn technology skills (over 100 senior citizens in the impoverished, rural community now know how to e-mail and do research on topics of their interest), and
• developing and delivering a PowerPoint presentation for a team of university judges.

A Curriculum Enriched by Technology

Enriching the curriculum with technology has served classes at Rogers and other schools that have since joined the Collaborative in many ways:

• An English class studying Our Town by Thornton Wilder used the Internet and other technologies to research changes in families from the time of this play to the present.
• A vocational agriculture class researched the impact of E-coli bacteria on local meat-processing plants.
• Two math classes worked with the Texas A&M University on the statistical possibilities of using cloud seeding to end the devastating local drought for farmers.
• In one distance-learning project, 23 students took an anthropology class entitled "Discovering the Genius of the Belizian Cultures." Dr. Norman Hammond from Boston University and Dr. Fred Valdez from the University of Texas at Austin, both internationally renowned Mayan archaeologists, mentored the class through distance learning and then met the students in person for several class sessions. Students worked in groups to investigate the problem of sustainability of resources for the Belizian people, focusing on the conflict between the need to destroy the rain forest to grow crops and the need to protect it—and the archaeological relics it may hold—for environmental, historical, and cultural reasons.
• In another project, 25 Rogers students, along with 40 students in 18 countries—including an ethnic Albanian student in Kosovo and students in many former Soviet Union countries—are enrolled in a distance-learning humanities course entitled "An End to Intolerance and Genocide." The course was developed by four Rogers students who attended an international youth summit at the University of Tennessee. Students taking the course have researched intolerance and genocide throughout history. In June they traveled to Washington, D.C., to conclude their study with a visit to the Holocaust Museum.

The Result: Higher Achievement

Most of Rogers’s students come from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds; yet they are achieving academically at significantly higher rates than the majority of Texas high school students. Between the academic years 1993–94 and 1998–99, Rogers High School’s Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) scores have risen in Reading from 79 to 94.7 percent, in Math from 63 to 77.2 percent, and in Writing from 86 to 91.2 percent. There is, moreover, only a 0.9 percent dropout rate at the school.

These and other indicators are showing that Rogers High School students are becoming informed global citizens who are not isolated by location, lack of expertise, or the inaccessibility of information. As they use technology to perform research, communicate with experts, and network with fellow students, they are acquiring the self-confidence and interpersonal skills that come from working with people of all ethnicities, ages, and backgrounds—confidence and skills they will, in turn, teach to others.

For more information:

Rogers High School

210 Alvin Ailey

Rogers, TX 76569

Principal: Robert Chappell

Carol Ann Bonds, Ph.D., Superintendent

Telephone: (254) 642-3802

Fax: (254) 642-3851

e-mail: rogersisd@hotmail.com