It is clear that school budgets are not keeping pace with increasing labor costs. Existing classroom education, will have to be supplemented with more efficient less labor intensive curriculum if we hope to meet the ever increasing student requirements for knowledge and thinking skills .

Student centered student driven electronically supported learning environments will soon be able to provide much of what was considered the classroom experience. Parts of learning reading, writing, history, math, science, music and arts are already available in CD software and on the web. And these sources are improving daily.

Electronic curriculum development has experienced a long and bumpy road. Often overstating its abilities and understating its costs. But the promise of a superhighway for learning is not fantasy. Parts of that highway are now in place and parts are being built as we speak.

The school's biggest leverage in meeting, and even surpassing its educational objective is to introduce students and parents to these electronic learning environments.

To get kids at a very early age to experience learning that goes at the speed they want to go, for durations they can attend to, to depths and breaths that are linked to their needs, not the needs of their peers or some arbitrary curriculum time line.

The lap top mobile lab model is great for K-6 students at Broken Arrow. The network infrastructure is already in place in every classroom.

Our envisioned curriculum will provide each student with guided tours of local and remote learning software. To facilitate these guided tours, we will engage a peer mentor model. In this program older children will help younger and less experienced children find and utilized these programs.

Each mobile lab can service 3-4 class rooms each day. It can be made available after school, evenings, and weekends. Again supported by a peer mentor process.

It is these introductions to software and it is this access to guided seat time that will allow students to more advantageously use the school's existing computer labs and encourage the acquisition and use of home computers.

Broken Arrow's challenge is great but our opportunity is greater. Our obligation is clear. We must open new avenues of learning for our students as old avenues become too expensive to operate. We must find and implement more efficient ways for kids to learn.