Schools Go Wireless

The Orange County Department of Education plans to install Pacific Bell’s wireless cable television service in every public school and district headquarters throughout the region. The goal, school officials say, is to use the high-tech system to provide teachers more training without having them leave their school campus.

The wireless cable system will initially be used to offer elementary school teachers new courses on reading instruction, as mandated by recent state laws.

“It costs us about $90 for a substitute each time a teacher leaves the school for a day,” said William Habermehl, associate superintendent of educational services for the department of education. “If we can keep the teachers on the campus and bring the training to them, it’ll be cheaper for us in the long run.”

Pacific Bell began offering its wireless cable service in Orange and Los Angeles counties in May. Local and basic cable channels are broadcast via microwave from a local mountaintop. These signals are captured by a thin antenna mounted on the side of a school building. The digital signal is then decoded by a box that sits on top of a television set.

County educators, along with officials with the Anaheim City School District and the Santa Ana Unified School District, started hashing out the details of the deal last week, according to PacBell spokeswoman Julie Dodd-Thomas. All 28 district headquarters, as well as one school per district, are scheduled to have the system installed by January.

The installation and equipment costs about $800 per site and will be paid with money from a state technology and education grant, Habermehl said. The remaining schools not covered by this initial sweep will have to pay the installation fee themselves.

About 250 schools in Orange County are already linked to PacBell’s wireless service.

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P.J. Huffstutter covers high technology for The Times. She can be reached at (714) 966-7830 and at [email protected]