Introduction

The National Information Infrastructure (NII), set forth by the President, encourages an acceleration of the goal to connect all of the nation's school classrooms, as well as libraries, hospitals, and law enforcement agencies to the "Information Superhighway."

In response to this federal goal, the Department of Education, in cooperation with the Department of Commerce, commissioned a survey to obtain baseline data on the status of advanced telecommunications in public elementary and secondary schools. The survey requested information regarding the types of advanced telecommunications equipment and services that are currently available in public schools and the specific locations of the equipment; current computer networking capabilities in public schools; area networks; the sources of their telecommunications technology; and the advanced telecommunications. The number of schools that have plans to connect to wide plans and of the various barriers that schools' budgetary decisions for limit schools' acquisition or use of

This E.D. TABS report contains tabular summaries based on data collected from the Survey of Advanced Telecommunications in US. Public Scholik, K-12, conducted for the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). E.D. TABS area collection of tables whose sole purpose is to make data or tables available to the general and research public quickly. E.D. TABS are not intended to present analyses of the data from the survey. The tabular summaries present the actual data collected and only selected findings are highlighted in this report.

The tables in this report present data for public schools and for schools by instructional level (elementary, secondary), size of enrollment (less than 300, 300-999, 1,000 or more), metropolitan status (city, urban fringe, town, rural) and geographic region of the country (northeast, southeast, central, west). The statistics in all tables are based on national estimates (see Table 1). Any statement of comparison made in this report has been tested for statistical significance through chi-square tests or t-tests adjusted for multiple comparisons using the Bonferroni adjustment and are significant at the .05 level or better.

The survey was conducted by Westat, Inc., a research firm in Rockville, Maryland, through the NCES Fast Response Survey System (FRSS). FRSS was designed to provide data quickly on policy-related issues regarding emerging educational developments.

The data from this survey provide valuable information that federal agencies will use to determine the magnitude of the tasks and activities required to help our nation's public schools obtain and use telecommunications technology. Additional, in-depth reports containing detailed analyses of the findings from the survey are forthcoming.

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