Navajo students hope Clinton will help them join information superhighway

SHIPROCK, N.M. - If President Clinton can build a bridge over the digital divide, Joe Rhoades will show his students where it is and how to use it.

''The way the world is going now, they need to know computers inside out and upside down to be able to function in the real world,'' Rhoades said Monday.

Clinton traveled from California to the small town Navajo reservation town of Shiprock in northwest New Mexico. He planned to talk about how to help Navajo students, who often live in homes without basic phone service, find their way onto the information superhighway.

Rhoades, a teacher at Tse' Bit' Ai School in Shiprock, said a fiber optic connection to Farmington should be extended to Shiprock. The fiber optic lines provide the high quality connections that make surfing the worlwide Web practical.

Now, Rhoades said the 500 middle school students use eight computers to connect to the Internet. Even during class, Rhoades said the students must share machines and get about 15 minutes each on the keyboard.

He said the school is going to cut the length of computer classes to provide more students a brief exposure to the Internet.

Other computers at the school are Internet-ready but the current connections, satellite and microwave, create a bottleneck.

''The problem we have is the high school runs our link,'' Rhoades said. ''When we have a lab online, if they need it, which happens every day, they (high school) cut us off.''

Rhoades said he hopes Clinton will talk about finding the money to connect Shiprock to the world with fiber optics.

His students have so little computer time, only the ones who learn quickly, can be considered computer literate,'' Rhoades said.

Rhoades said the Internet connection would allow students to explore a new world that can provide jobs with good wages and benefits.

''It does open up horizons,'' Rhoades said. ''Right now, most of them stay on the reservation. A lot of them will work, but a lot of them will live on government funding.''