Students Tap Into Talk Online With 1st Lady

Students at Fenton Avenue Charter School in Lake View Terrace are living proof that things do indeed happen fast in the information age.

Over the weekend, Fenton’s five remaining classrooms lacking Internet connections received the necessary wiring to hook them up.

By Monday, a group of students at the northeast Valley elementary school were participating in a live, online cyberchat with First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. The question-and-answer session was broadcast locally on KABC radio and nationally on the C-SPAN network.

“KABC called our school and asked if we wanted to take part in this,” said Irene Sumida, Fenton’s director of instruction. “We were just getting our Internet connection up and we thought what a great way to practice.”

KABC broadcaster Michael Jackson moderated the program, in which Clinton, who was in Washington, D.C., fielded questions submitted via the Internet from students at Fenton, Pio Pico Elementary School in Los Angeles and Cal State Fullerton.

Eighteen Fenton students were selected to submit questions to Clinton during the hourlong session. They spent the hour in the computer laboratory, poised at their keyboards, while the rest of the school watched the event on television monitors.

Alas, the first lady only answered one question posed by a Fenton student, a second-grader who asked, “Are you happy?” Sumida said.

“She said, ‘Yes, definitely. I have a lot of things to be happy about,’ ” Sumida said.

Still, as an educational tool, Sumida thought the interactive broadcast was a big success.

“Being able to communicate with Hillary Clinton shows the students that what they think really matters,” she said.