Kevin Kelly/Key photo Macy Drumright, a fifth grader from St. Patrick School, installs a computer in the fifth grade classroom at Holy Cross School in northeast Kansas City.

“Yay, St. Patrick’s!” they cheered.

St. Patrick’s? Yep. The technicians who had rebuilt the donated computers and set them up for Internet connection inside the classroom were their peers from St. Patrick School’s Technology Club, just across the Missouri River in Clay County.

The club’s faculty sponsor, R. J. Keitchen, said the computers were part of a gift from Lockheed-Martin that he originally was going to turn down. St. Patrick had already received 30 computers from the U.S. Department of Prisons that the club had updated and refurbished for their own school’s use.

But then he talked to St. Patrick Principal Julie Hess who suggested that Holy Cross could use them.

Jean Ferrara, Holy Cross principal, was thrilled.

“They called and said they had a club that refurbishes computers and asked if we would like to be a part of that,” Ferrara said. “I said, ‘Are you kidding? Of course, we would.’”

Holy Cross received an E-Rate grant from the Federal Communications Commission for the hardware and labor to set up the entire the school for wireless Internet access. That’s important, said Ferrara, because it can put computers directly into classrooms instead of into a central computer lab.

“We don’t have room here for a computer lab,” Ferrara said. “And this way, our teachers can use computers to teach right in the classroom.”

But a leaky roof and torrential rains during the summer of 2007 wiped out 26 of Holy Cross’s wireless-ready computers. Ferrara said that corporations that are upgrading their computer hardware are often willing to donate their old equipment, but that’s not always a good idea to take them, she said.

“Sometimes gifted computers are like getting used cars. They don’t work so well,” she said.

Enter the St. Patrick Technology Club, which has grown to about 30 students this year.

They weren’t about to pass along used computers to Holy Cross unless they were what Holy Cross needed.

“We put the wireless network in,” said fifth grader Alex Weber. “Then we put in all the programs. Some of the external hard drives were also bad and we had to replace them, too.”

“It’s pretty hard work,” said sixth grader Aidan Decker, who with his brother Rowan came up with the idea to begin St. Patrick’s Technology Club to learn how to work on computers.

“You just have to go slow and be patient,” Decker said.

“They give you instructions,” said seventh grader Haley Gessler. “We do projects and make all kinds of electronics. It’s really cool.”

“It was hard at first,” said fourth grader Viet Nguyen, “But it’s not really hard once you get used to doing it.”

Keitchen said the Holy Cross project was not only a lesson in electronics, it was also a lesson in service. The St. Patrick students not only gutted and rebuilt the donated computers, they also raised funds for the parts and software to bring the computers up to standard.

“These are not the fastest, most high-end computers on the planet, but they will do all the basic stuff,” Keitchen said.

The 10 computers that St. Patrick brought to Holy Cross were installed in the second, third and fifth grade classrooms. Many of the children at Holy Cross do not have access to computers at home, Ferrara said.

“We’re going to have lots of kids doing lots of things,” she said.

“That is the world we are living in — a world of communications, and we’re going to teach them how to do it safely,” Ferrara said.

“And this is another Catholic school helping us,” she said. “Except for the river, we are neighbors. There are Catholic people thinking about us all over.”

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