Students at St.

Thursday, November 11, 1999

Students at St. Joseph High School soon will be connected to the rest of the world.

Dawson-Bryant High School CISCO Academy students wired the building for networking and Internet access this past weekend as part of a federal grant that targets computers at the middle school grade level.

"They are wiring the whole second and third floor – 10 rooms," said Jim Mains, Ironton Catholic School System administrator. "We’re very excited about this. We’re very fortunate to be in this position to get these new computers and a connection to the outside world."

St. Joseph students will not be the only ones to benefit from this project, however. Dawson-Bryant students also received valuable hands-on working experience, said Joel Utsinger, CISCO Academy instructor.

CISCO is a networking company which has sponsored networking classes at various high schools and colleges to train a larger workforce for a career in networking, Utsinger said.

"This is the second large-scale job that we’ve done," Utsinger said. "The first one was at the Pilasco-Ross educational facility in Portsmouth. We’ve also done a lot within our school district as well."

And when studying something like networking, the more experience one can get out in the field the better, said Jason Brown, a Dawson-Bryant senior.

"You can’t learn something like this by reading a textbook," Brown said. "Until you get the hands-on experience you don’t learn anything."

Plus, it feels good to help other schools realize their technological potentials, Dawson-Bryant junior Stacy Easterling said.

"It’s not only a grade, they don’t have anything," Miss Easterling said. "If we didn’t do this, they wouldn’t have anything for technology."

Before the grant, St. Joe High School only had one computer lab. Now they have 13 new computers, two laptops and the ability to network all of those computers, and go online, said Don Washburn, Dawson-Bryant technology coordinator.

The school’s architecture was considered, and wiring was done in such a way as to not compromise the beauty of the old building, Utsinger said.