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"Children
are the world's greatest resource and its best hope for the future." Hampton Roads has an excellent education system, but as always, we're constrained by limited resources, and we constantly seek improvement. Smart Communities use technology to improve technology resources in schools, to promote collaboration and the sharing of best practices within and between school districts, while encouraging and supporting teachers and administrators in using technology to enhance instruction in core subject areas. As with other Smart Region initiatives, what we can contribute to Hampton Roads' educational excellence is constrained only by our imagination. Part of Smart Region's mission is to pull together disparate efforts throughout the region and coordinate them into a more purposeful, cohesive whole. We are currently working with several regional education organizations, including the Consortium for Interactive Instruction (CII) and the Hampton Roads Public Education Services Agency (HRPESA) to advance our mutual goals. CII is a user-directed, user-funded activity managed by WHRO-TV that leads the transformation of education by advocating the most appropriate uses of technology (i.e. computers, videodiscs, modems, etc.) in the classroom. Inaugurated in 1984, the C.I.I. currently represents over 25,000 educators and nearly 250,000 students in Southeastern Virginia. HRPESA is a regional organization that allows and encourages member school systems to maximize taxpayer dollars through combining purchase orders to take advantage of volume pricing, conducting joint employee training activities, and sharing other common services or programs. Since its inception in January, 1999, the agency has assisted in several joint purchases and programs contributing to significant savings and increased efficiencies for the member jurisdictions. Those relationships are already paying off. At present, Smart Region is considering a technological system to share resources and enable previously impossible achievements, even between school districts. For example, take teacher training, an ongoing and critical need in education not just in Hampton Roads, but throughout Virginia and the country. Currently, if the best instructor of French works in, say, the Suffolk public schools, and teachers need training in French in other jurisdictions, the only way to make that happen is for a teacher to get in his car and drive to a class, not an easy prospect in a region as geographically large as Hampton Roads. So each school district has to dedicate its own resources or, worse and all too common, teachers don't get the training and educational development we all would like. That's particularly true when the need is limited to a small number of teachers. Imagine, however, that the French instructor can deliver instruction from the Suffolk school system, and using technology, teachers who choose to do so can receive that instruction in their own schools, whether they are in Chesapeake, Hampton, Poquoson, Surry, Virginia Beach, or any other school system in Hampton Roads? Two great benefits happen: by sharing their talents, time, and other resources, school systems across Hampton Roads conserve already limited funding, and perhaps even better, they accomplish something truly important - teacher training - that would not otherwise be possible. That's distance learning, and it works. Imagine, too, if you extend the same principle to direct instruction, enabling new and advanced subjects to students across Hampton Roads, drawing on content and resources that until now were simply unavailable. Imagine you did the same thing with administrative meetings and issues that come before school systems in Hampton Roads and across Virginia, providing school system administrators with crucial new tools to better manage very complex enterprises. As we're fond of saying here, what we can do is constrained only by our imagination, our aspirations, our dreams. Hampton Roads can have the best managed schools, best trained teachers, and best educated children on the planet if we make it a priority and better use the tools and resources at our disposal. And while we aren't exactly sure how to get there, Smart Region Hampton Roads is ready and able to assist. Children are our greatest resource and our best hope for the future, so let's get cracking.
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