Oct. 16, 2004 – Ivanna Eudora Kean High School students are on their way to better technology skills thanks to a U.S. Coast Guard donation of $90,000 in computers and related equipment, according to a release.
The school's JROTC senior army instructor, Lt. Col. David Waller (U.S. Army, retired), with the help of U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Alvin Dalmida Jr., Coast Guard Telecommunication Information System Command, Alexandria, Va., coordinated the delivery of 41 computers to Eudora Kean as a part of continuing effort to help improve the school's access to technological applications. This is the second donation in less than a year for which the JROTC stepped in and paid for computer systems to be delivered to schools in the V.I., the release said.
The Coast Guard's donation provides students access to basic and high-level applications from word processing and spreadsheets to the Internet. Students use the systems for class work, scholarship applications and research.
Eudora Kean was selected because Lt. Col. Waller intervened when another school was unable to provide funding to ship the computers from Virginia to St. Thomas. That school remains on the Coast Guard's list for a future donation.
"Over the last year JROTC spent approximately $7,000 for delivery of more than 80 computers and computer related equipment such as printers, scanners, modems, routers, hubs, and other computer peripherals for schools in the VI. We have quite a shortage of computers, so we're really excited about this," Waller said. "These will be put to good use. All of these things [new computers] work together with the JROTC program. The more students can access computers, the more technically literate they will become. We hope to use the computers to hookup to the Internet so students can communicate around the country and globally."
A number of U.S. Coast Guard units have donated an estimated 400 systems to local schools in the U.S. territory through its Partnership for Education program and Presidential Executive Order 12999 authorizing government agencies to distribute surplus equipment to non-profit organizations and schools K-12.
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