High-tech help for Jamaican school

As a Peace Corps volunteer digging latrines in the West African nation of Mali, James Burke began thinking about computers and how they could help the world.

He decided that when he got home, he wanted to be a teacher.

And as a teacher, he wanted to find a way to help people in Third World countries through technology.

Fast-forward more than a decade, and Burke is an advanced computer-skills teacher at Tyee Middle School in Bellevue. Boxes of desktop computers and laptops sit at the front of his classroom, waiting to be packed into suitcases.

On Wednesday, Burke and 12 students will take the computers to Jamaica, where they will install the hardware in a poor public school in Negril.

The Sheffield All Ages School doesn't have any computers, and the teachers there have little knowledge of how to use them, Burke said. Burke and his students will spend 12 days training them on the basics: how to turn a computer on, use a mouse, save a file, write in a Word document.

"My students know far more than the teachers there," Burke said. "They'll be helping to answer questions while I go through the training."

Tyee's trip to Jamaica

To check in on the students' daily progress in Jamaica, go to : www.tyeelovesjamaica.org

Burke isn't the only teacher who is working to share technology with the rest of the world. Other schools around the Eastside and Seattle have similar programs, including Seattle's Garfield High School, which has been doing it the longest. In 10 years, the school's Global Technology Academy has made 25 trips abroad to install computer labs in countries from the Philippines to Guatemala to Turkey.

"When we started doing this 10 years ago, people had never heard of a school doing this before," said Kjell Rye, the academy's president and a technology-education teacher at Garfield. "Before, people thought we were nuts. Now it's like the jazz band; the program has become part of the fabric of the school."

As a student teacher, Burke visited Rye's class, and what he saw helped motivate him to press forward with his own plan. He spent the last four years getting his program up and running, establishing contacts and raising about $18,000 through grants.

The goal, Burke said, is twofold: for the Bellevue students to gain a broader world perspective, and to give the Sheffield students access to computers and skills they wouldn't have otherwise. Burke hopes that the Sheffield girls especially will take advantage of the training, giving them a chance to move beyond employment as maids at hotels or resorts.

He plans a five-year commitment to keep the computer lab running, taking students to Jamaica each year.

The inaugural group includes 10 eighth-graders from Tyee, and two students from Newport High School who previously had Burke as a teacher .

"I took Mr. Burke's class for two years, and I kept hearing him talk about this trip to Jamaica," said Matt Eschbach, a 10th-grader at Newport High School. "I'm interested in the whole Peace Corps thing, and I want to know what it feels like to help people who are in need and give them something they don't have."

Most of the Sheffield students share desks, chairs and school supplies, and students here say they don't really know what it will be like to meet kids their age who have never been around a computer.

"I don't know how, but I believe this trip will change me," said Will Kirby, an eighth-grader at Tyee. "I know it'll be a good experience."

Rachel Tuinstra: 206-515-5637 or rtuinstra@seattletimes.com