STAR School

Attaching the video cable Where is that screw? Loren Begay is a teachers assistant at STAR School, a charter elementary school located 5 miles off the Navajo reservation, 30 miles East of Flagstaff, Arizona. STAR stands for"Service To All Relations" and they pride themselves on working with children that can work with computer technology. The school serves students in grades K-8 who live in the Southwest corner of the Navajo Nation and the surrounding rural area. He initially contacted me in Dec '04 saying they have a lot of Laptop computers that need maintenance, and he wondered if we could help. I told him "I don't see how we can help. We refurbish donated desktop computers and give them to schools, churches, and non profit agencies in this area (or elsewhere if there is someone in this area that can handle the shipping), and occasionally we receive a laptop and if it works we distribut it, but we dont have any ability to work on laptops that don't work. The closest thing we have done in that area is if we had two laptops, one with a bad hard drive but good screen, and another with a bad screen but good hard drive, is taking the hard drive and installing it in the machine with the good screen. We have assisted a few indian reservations get started refurbishing desktop computers for the members of their tribes, but even that would require someone from your tribe to come to Tulsa for a few days to learn how we do what we do. If someone was able to do that, we would give them an image machine (the tool we use to copy images to the refurbished computers).

Son says thumbs up, while daughter is waiting in the back to load the U-Haul This printer is heavy The image we use for machines we refurbish for schools and day care centers is here. It is currently appropriate for grades 1-6, but we are looking for educators to help us identify appropriate public domain software for preschool and grades 7-12 and when we get that we will be expanding our children's image." In April I heard back from him asking about the training (how long would it take (at least a day or two, longer if he wanted), what did he need to bring (a willingness to learn), would it cost him anything (no), and would he be able to return with some computers (yes). We exchanged a few more emails and finally on July 22 Loren, his wife, two daughters, and son arrived in Tulsa. We spent most of three days (Saturday, Sunday, and Monday) refurbishing units, learning how to use the Road Warrior (which is what we now call our Imaging Machine), and learning some of the tricks of getting the covers off of some machines, and how to remove the Hard Drive, and on Tuesday morning he came with a U-Haul and loaded up two Road Warriors (one of which has the ability to make more Road Warriors), seven Child 1-6 machines, 5 Net machines, and 4 Senior machines, with monitors and keyboards, plus a few printers and scanners.

Getting another computer This monitor is heavy The computers will be used in STAR School in two ways teaching the students language, math, geography, science, etc as models for teaching refurbishing. When we first started refurbishing computers, Jim Erwin came up to Tulsa from Belize, and we taught him computer refurbishing, and he took that knowledge back to the Belize Bible and Trade School and began teaching computer refurbishing. He reported back that the graduates of that program got some of the best paying jobs in the country, because there were almost no computer technicians in Belize. Computers from Star School will also be given to non-profits if they have any extras available. I urged them to do this right away, because they should be able to get some good publicity from the local newspapers and TV stations, which should get them plenty of machines to refurbish. At some point, they want to be able to give each graduate a computer for their home use. In mid August we expect someone from the Nairobi, Kenya from the Book Aid Trust (a charitable [not for profit] organization supporting literacy through a program of donated books) to come to learn Computer Refurbishing (and ship some machines back to Nairobi), and sometime in August we expect Kim Collins from the Helping Ardmore Foundation will be coming to Tulsa for training.

We are really filling the U-Haul up Almost full U-Haul is full, and we are ready to go back to Flagstaff!!!