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Classifieds

Issue date: April 21, 2000

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Eva Soos

President Clinton visits with students and faculty from Costano School in East Palo Alto Monday during a tour promoting access to technology for low-income groups.

Eva Soos

Heidi Gregory, a volunteer from America Online, helps Jasmine Patino, 4, and Anayeli amora, 6, work on a computer at Plugged In, the East Palo Alto computer training center, prior to President Clinton's visit.

Clinton decries 'digital divide'

Jennifer Kavanaugh

For one day at least, the city of East Palo Alto basked in the national spotlight when President Bill Clinton traveled to the community Monday, highlighting local efforts to improve computer access and challenging Silicon Valley leaders to give more low-income groups and people of color a role in the technological revolution.

Clinton came to East Palo Alto as part of a multistate tour to discuss the so-called "digital divide"--the gap between people who have ready access to technology and the Internet and those who do not.

In East Palo Alto, the president visited Plugged In, a nonprofit organization that gives residents computer access and Internet training, and met with leaders from the high-tech industry at Costano Elementary School to discuss ways to make technology and high-tech jobs available to more people.

Joined at Plugged In by cabinet members, members of Congress, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Silicon Valley executives, Clinton acted like a Santa Claus for the high-tech industry, announcing a number of private initiatives designed to help East Palo Alto take better advantage of Silicon Valley's technology.

The president announced several programs, including $5 million and a new building for Plugged In from Hewlett-Packard; technology training for all of the city's teachers from Gateway; 300 new computers for the city's schools from PeoplePC; and a high-tech job training center to be established by Applied Materials and the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition.

"The one thing you have is physical proximity," Clinton told community members in the audience, adding that low-income citizens in remote areas such as Appalachia have a much more difficult time getting on the Internet. "You ought to make the most of it."

But the president also acknowledged a question on the minds of several community members: How much will things really improve after the presidential motorcade pulled out of town, the television lights dimmed and the executives went back to their shiny offices across Highway 101?

Clinton said the industry needed to make a more concerted effort and spend more time finding and training people in East Palo Alto to fill jobs and less time getting visas for foreign engineers and programmers to come here.

"In the classified section of the San Jose Mercury News Sunday, there were 10,000 technology-related jobs," Clinton said, holding up a copy of that paper. "If they could be held by all of the unemployed or underemployed citizens in East Palo Alto, this would be a better world."

Clinton is the second national figure in recent months to hold East Palo Alto up as the ultimate example of low-income exclusion from the technological revolution, a city surrounded by the affluent homes and corporations of Silicon Valley. In December, Jesse Jackson announced the opening of a new Rainbow/PUSH Coalition office in East Palo Alto to encourage companies to get more diverse employees and managers. The office now sits around the corner from Plugged In.

The event, which also included a choir of Costano students singing outside the Plugged In building, attracted dozens of media outlets, including local newspapers, national television networks and the White House traveling press corps. Before the event, East Palo Alto Mayor Sharifa Wilson said she was happy to see the national media come to East Palo Alto for different reasons than in the early 1990s, when the city was known as the murder capital of the country.

Wilson said the events will also remind Silicon Valley that its residents can be a part of the high-tech workforce. "We're going to have a dialogue with some executives who have probably never even been to Silicon Valley," she said.

The event also gave Plugged In more national exposure, holding it up as an example of how corporations and the community can work together. Sponsored by high-tech companies and personal donations, Plugged In runs afterschool computer programs for children and teaches Web development to teens, who work on projects for paying clients such as Pacific Bell.

Jerone Hill, a 15-year-old sophomore at Menlo-Atherton High School, said he had access only to computers at school before he started coming to Plugged In about a year ago. Now learning how to work with a Java program, Hill wants to become a computer scientist or electrical engineer.

"I was amazed by the computers, and I knew that that's what I wanted to do," Hill explained. "I've found what I really want to do. They've shown a better picture for me."

During the event, Carly Fiorina, Hewlett-Packard's CEO, told Clinton and the audience that the industry's never-ending search for more talent makes companies receptive to working with people from East Palo Alto and other communities.

Eric Krock, a Netscape employee who volunteers at Plugged In, said people in his industry are looking for young talent like Hill. He said that Netscape, for instance, will be offering eight full-time internships to Plugged In students to work on a project this summer.

"What struck me is how smart these kids were and how quickly they learned, and what a tragedy it would be if they didn't get Internet access and Web skills," Krock said.

Jennifer Kavanaugh writes for the Palo Alto Weekly, a sister paper of the Voice.