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The One-Room School Bus
By PAUL TOUGH
The Kids who live in the tiny timber community of Grapevine, Ark., spend up to three hours a day riding the yellow school bus to and from Sheridan,louboutin, the larger town 16 miles away where they go to school. It's a demanding commute: students get up before dawn to catch the morning bus, and they generally have to forego after-school activities and tutoring to avoid missing the bus home. Grapevine's children already face considerable educational challenges — only 2 percent of the town's adults are college graduates — and all those hours spent staring out the window as the bus bumps along dirt roads stand as just one more barrier to a high-quality education.
Billy Hudson,burberry, a professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, grew up in poverty in Grapevine, and he has a plan to turn those idle hours from a disadvantage into an opportunity: an experimental program that transforms the school bus into a mobile classroom. He calls it the Aspirnaut Initiative. Thanks to Hudson's project,casque beats, two of the three buses that serve Grapevine are now wired for Internet connectivity. High-achieving students who are accepted into the program are issued laptop computers and enrolled in online math and science courses, including algebra and advanced-placement biology. On the way to and from school,doudouen moncler, they complete assignments, do research and communicate with instructors by email. Older students use MacBooks; younger students get the hardy,doudoune moncler pas cher, bright green XO laptops being distributed in developing countries around the world as part of Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child program.
The Aspirnaut Initiative is still in the pilot stage; as of this fall,abercrombie, 10 Grapevine students are taking the online,casque dr dre, on-the-road courses,abercrombie and fitch, and another 20 have been given video iPods loaded with science and math content to watch on the bus. And for now, the program's modest $50,000 annual budget comes from private donors and the Hudson family. But the project may soon start to grow. In September, Julie Hudson, Billy's wife,burberry pas cher, a doctor who also teaches at Vanderbilt,louboutin pas cher, presented the State Legislature in Little Rock with a plan for expansion, along with a request for $2 million in state financing. By next fall, the Hudsons say they hope to have enrolled 2,000 students in rural communities across Arkansas.
