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Photos by Bob Pennell Elk Trail School students Brent Smith, in the seventh grade, and Amanda Rauls, an eighth-grader, peer into their project at Tech Toys in Shady Cove. The students at Elk Trail run their own computer salvage and rebuilding business at the shop, helping raise money for their school's technology cause. Info superhighway is Elk Trail Thanks to a savvy teacher, these kids are state of the art BY VICKI GUARINO TRAIL -- Need a computer? No problem if you're a junior high student here. Just take one home. Need a computer during class? In a room of 30 students and 22 computers, no one waits long to get their hands on a keyboard. How about a printer? Scanner? CD-ROM drive? Internet access? Video camera? Teacher Priscilla Robinson has them all jammed into her seventh- and eighth-grade classroom. "We have more computers too, but I just ran out of space in here," Robinson says, glancing around one of the most technology-packed schoolrooms around. Elk Trail eighth-grader Sarah Cochran, left, helps classmate Jessica Schatzman with an assignment in their computer-filled classroom. What these kids don't have, they build. What they can't build, they raise money for and buy. Grants and a student store, and sales of -- surprise -- computer components students salvage from donated machines keep the enterprise afloat financially. In the process, technology has become an integral part of curriculum at Elk Trail -- the smallest public junior high in Jackson County. With the exception of penmanship drills, students like seventh-grader Nick Kopp say they use a computer in every subject and just about every assignment. Classmate Matt Curtis took one of the class computers home last fall. Like a long-term library loan, students can check out a computer and return it at the end of the school year. "That's pretty much where I get my work done, at home," Matt says. The prominence technology holds in this classroom has developed through years of personal interest by Robinson and her students. "My interest started when the first computer walked into the classroom 20 years ago," Robinson remembers. "I was intrigued." Figuring students would be equally interested, Robinson, then at the Shady Cove school, signed herself up for training. Suddenly, she became the school's computer expert. When six more computers arrived at Shady Cove School, they wound up in Robinson's hands. She and her sixth- through eighth-grade students took it from there. "We kind of taught each other about computers," she says. Since then, the pursuit of technology has taken Robinson, her students, and even her family into high-tech business. For the family, there's Tech Toys, a Shady Cove computer shop owned by Robinson's sister, Joyce Baker. The business grew from the efforts of Baker's computer-savvy son to help Robinson's students salvage donated computers. "Tech Toys was an offshoot of the classroom," Robinson says. From the classroom's salvaging effort, Baker saw a marketing opportunity. The shop specializes in the crucial but extinct components that keep older-model computers running. For business managers who aren't ready to replace an entire network of computers, and tinkerers who don't want to give up an old 486, Tech Toys' stock is golden. For the students, there's a student store and various fund-raisers that finance computer purchases. And they run their own salvaging business at Tech Toys. For an hour or so every afternoon, Tech Toys becomes an auxiliary classroom where students strip valuable components from donated computers and build new, up-to-the-minute models for school. Eighth-grader Lyndsey Roberts doubts she'll become a computer technician because of the class, but says she's gaining information about fixing and updating equipment that's useful to any computer owner. "It's something that's good to know," Lyndsey says. "You actually get to learn what to do with them." On the work bench now are all the components for the class' most advanced project: a Pentium 200 with video. The computer will be the centerpiece in a class presentation at a regional education conference in Seattle in mid-March. Students who don't attend will watch events on classroom computer monitors. The group was invited, says Robinson, to showcase their fund-raising efforts. "They've been a pretty industrious bunch of kids," she says. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA