Copyright 2000 Knight Ridder

SECTION: DOMESTIC NEWS

KR-ACC-NO: K4385

LENGTH: 1312 words

HEADLINE: Clinton tour next week will highlight 'digital divide'

BYLINE: By Tony Pugh

EAST PALO ALTO, Calif. _ Every night, when Herb Leonard leaves his job at an import-export company, he drives past the corner store, turns right at the vacant lot and pulls into a technological oasis. The greeting on the brightly colored building offers a friendly challenge: "If you're a dreamer, come in." Once inside, Leonard checks his e-mail, surfs the web
and learns to use the latest software. Across the room, eight youngsters create computer art while several teens learn the basics of web-site design. This high-tech playground is "Plugged In," a non-profit community center that's helping to bridge the so-called "digital divide" separating those who are wired from those who are not. The center's annual budget of
$575,000 is paid by corporate, individual and foundation contributions. Internet powers such as Oracle, Cisco, Netscape and Excite are based only a few miles down the highway, but most residents of this impoverished Silicon Valley city are worlds away and years behind the technology that has transformed this region into one of the world's most
important business centers.

Like other low-income areas and rural communities across the country, East Palo Alto is on the wrong side of the digital divide, along with other communities that are too poor, too isolated or too unskilled to profit from
the new economy. Experts and policy makers say closing the divide is the most important civil rights issue of the Internet revolution.

On Monday, President Clinton is scheduled to visit "Plugged In" at the start of a two-day tour to raise public awareness about the issue. During trips to a computer show in Chicago and the Navajo Indian Nation in Shiprock, N.M., Clinton will propose incentives such as tax credits, low interest loans and regulatory relief to help bring Internet and broadband
access and cellular and satellite phone service to underserved areas.

A recent study by the Department of Commerce found that people who earn at least $75,000 are 20 times more likely to have Internet access and 9 times more likely to have a computer at home than low-income Americans. Black and Hispanic homes are about as a third as likely to have Internet access as those of Asian descent and only
40 percent as likely as white households. Americans living in rural areas, regardless of their income, still lag far behind their urban counterparts in Internet access.

"If you're laying fiber-optic cable and you avoid certain communities, you're hurting all the schools, all the libraries, all the businesses _ all the people in that community," said Mark Lloyd, executive director of the Civil Rights Forum on Communications Policy, a non-profit group that wants to apply civil rights principles to communications issues.

While evidence suggests that the divide is narrowing, it remains wide.

About 40 percent of American Indians don't even have telephone service, said Karen Buller, president of the National Indian
Telecommunications Institute in Santa Fe., N.M. Companies are reluctant to provide service to large, remote and sparsely populated reservations, Buller said.

The institute, which supports electronic technology for remote American Indian tribes, will use a grant from the Kellogg
Foundation to explore ways to overcome the obstacles to providing satellite and wireless phone and Internet service on tribal lands. The information should help individual tribes negotiate service contracts, Buller said.

The technology gap isn't confined to poor, disenfranchised communities.

Because the local phone company doesn't provide it, Irving Wolfe, a resident of Vashon, Wash., has to pay an alternate provider nearly $400 a month for high-speed Internet service on the small, affluent island in Puget
Sound where he publishes an investment newsletter.

"Most people on the island just can't pay that much, so we've been begging the phone company for (affordable) service," Wolfe said.

Those marketing assumptions are one of the main obstacles to bridging the divide. Many companies don't feel the investment needed to provide service to remote, isolated or low-income areas will generate enough
profit to justify the expenditure.

Lloyd compared the situation to the cable television revolution of the late '70s and '80s, when companies targeted service in the suburbs, figuring profits would be greatest where residents had more disposable income.
The industry has since realized that cable service also thrives in poor congested urban areas where residents have fewer entertainment choices and less money to buy them.

Rather than wait for market forces to work, companies and foundations are taking the lead in bridging the divide.

New Edge Networks of Vancouver, Wash., seeks to provide broadband Internet access to towns with no more than 250,000 people. The company is betting it can corner a market share that larger companies now ignore, said company spokesman Sal Cinquegrani. New Edge has raised more $100 million from venture capitalists and corporate
investors. Today, it offers service in about 100 communities in six states. Early next year, New Edge expects to reach 1,000 communities in all 50 states.

In Houston, Tony Chase, the chairman and CEO of ChaseCom, a minority-owned telecommunications company, has created
the Telecom Opportunity Institute, a non-profit organization that steers low-income residents toward careers in information technology.

With private funding, the institute operates the Telecom Career Academy, in which volunteers teach computer basics to poor
youngsters. The academies operate in throughout Texas, as well as in Dorsey High School in Los Angeles and, later this year, at a Native American school in Santa Fe, N.M.

"These are bright capable, determined kids who are willing and want to learn," Chase said. "The sooner more of the private
sector sees these kinds of efforts as being in our collective best interest, the sooner we'll solve this problem."

Other companies have chosen to go after markets now ignored by the technology industry. In the heart of the Research
Triangle in Durham, N.C., a minority-owned systems integration company, EasyWeb, has established and maintains computer centers in federal housing projects, a drug rehab center and an elderly apartment complex. GTE provides
free Internet access.

Company president Erroll Reese hopes to establish similar centers in distressed areas when local governments and businesses are willing to fund them. Staffing the centers has been the most difficult hurdle because the positions are unpaid, yet require vast computer knowledge.

"The technology is great, but if there's no one there to teach them how to use it, it may as well not be there," Reese said.

That's why programs such as "Plugged In" are crucial to poor areas such as East Palo Alto, where 81 percent of schoolchildren qualify for free or reduced-cost lunches. President Clinton wants to triple the Department of Education's support for community technology centers from $32.5 million in fiscal year 2000 to $100 million in 2001. The goal
is to fund 1,000 centers nationwide.

Founded in 1992, "Plugged In" is open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., Monday through Friday, and employs eight full-time staffers
who provide computer training to adults and children at no charge. Leonard got involved after he dropped by three years ago to see what the program was all about.

"I saw everybody working on the computers, so I said, 'Let me get involved with this information age,' " said Leonard.
"I've been a regular ever since. People can really change their life around with these computers."

(For more information, check these web sites:
www.digitaldividenetwork.org, www.civilrightsforum.org and www.digitaldivide.gov.)

PHOTOS (from KRT Photo Service)

(c) 2000, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.