WASHINGTON-Lockheed Elementary School in Marietta, Ga., became the 100th school involved in the ClassLink program, which evolved from a challenge issued by U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich to the wireless industry at the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association’s annual convention more than two years ago.
The ClassLink program equips teachers, administrators and school support staff with wireless phones, allowing them to keep in touch with each other, parents, law enforcement officials and outside education resources.
Gingrich urged the industry to start small. “Bring modern communications to a couple of schools in the District of Columbia,” he challenged. Soon after, Washington D.C.’s J.O. Wilson School became the first school to benefit from Gingrich’s challenge.
Last week, J.O. Wilson School helped Gingrich and CTIA inaugurate the 100th ClassLink school by receiving the first call made from the newly equipped school.
A survey conducted by Bernard Engelhard & Associates Inc., which polled 229 teachers in 29 ClassLink-equipped schools, found 46 percent believe the wireless phone is the most important classroom technology, followed by laptop computers at 21 percent and Internet access at 12 percent.
“Sometimes the things we take the most for granted can have the biggest impact,” said Thomas Wheeler, chief executive officer and president of Washington, D.C.-based CTIA.
“People who wouldn’t go to work without a telephone on their desk, send their children to be educated in an environment without this most basic productivity tool.
“When it comes right down to it, the tools teachers need are sometimes the most fundamental,” Wheeler continued. “It’s not the glitz and glamour that educators want, it’s a more basic ability to communicate beyond the four walls of the classroom.”
