PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY THE TAMPA TRIBUNE

TEMPLE TERRACE NEWS

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12, 2003 ♦ ALSO SERVING THE UNIVERSITY AREA

Local Firm Provides High Tech Options To Schools

SCHOOL CHOICE PLAN HEADS TO INTERNET

By MICHAEL HINMAN

mhinman@mediageneral.com

With the kind of clients Ken Tozier brings in – company presidents, secretaries of state, elections supervisors and the like – one might expect to find a larger office building housing International Computer Works. But hidden in the least likely of places at a once run-down convenience store on Riverhills Drive near 56^th Street, Tozier’s company works on projects that have made elections smoother, houses easier to find by emergency vehicles, and computerized routes for school bus drivers in more than a dozen states around the country.

Tozier’s latest project, however, brings him closer to home as his company develops the software to allow parents of Hillsborough County School District students quickly and easily find the schools in their geographic region base on where they live.

“We’re gearing up our application for the start of the School Choice Program for 2004,” said Tozier from his busy office. Books and papers are stacked on and around his desk, while engineers and assistants constantly poke their head in to discuss the different projects under development at ICW. “We’re already using this for students trying to get into magnet schools, and it’s tools like this that really come in handy, especially when you have 6,000 applications for just 1,500 seats.”

Hillsborough County School District employees receive training about the new software developed for the School Choice Program at International Computer Works in Temple Terrace. ICW, which developed the application software for parents to locate what schools are available to them under the new plan, uses map data to provide a variety of software to companies and government organizations.

The School Choice Program in Hillsborough County gets under way in the 2004-05 school year. After the county was ruled to be in compliance with the 1960s-era desegregation laws, and no longer would be forced to bus students to different schools to keep racial quotas, the district developed a new choice plan that would allow students in their kindergarten, sixth grade and freshman years to choose the school they would like to attend.

Under the plan, the county is separated into seven regions, with a group of elementary schools, middle schools, high schools and magnet schools located in each region. Depending on where students live, they are assigned a “home” school, but given a choice of other surrounding schools to attend instead, many offering different attractor programs like finance, sign language, aquaculture and the culinary arts.

Tozier’s company is developing an application that soon will be available on the Hillsborough County School District Web site at www.sdhc.k12.fl.us. There, parents can enter their street address and find out exactly which region they live in, what their home school is, what schools are available to them, and which schools within the region the school district will offer bus transportation to for their child. Each search result is personalized to the home address.

“When we do things like this, we like to stop and take a look at the lives we’re impacting,” Tozier said. “We have an opportunity to contribute a little piece for the betterment of subsequent generations we represent.”

With the application, generated by ICW’s GeoChoice software, available on the internet, school district counselors will be able to visit lower income areas in the county with laptop computers and provide school choice information to those who don’t have the internet. Tozier said that having such personalized information at parents’ fingertips will make the change in student populations much more manageable.

Tozier started ICW in 1988 out of his Temple Terrace home. He had applied for and won a contract with Dow Jones to provide a telemarketing system that helped the company sell subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal. Creating applications was a bit different than his previous work selling computer systems to business and municipalities, but it was one that quickly started to give him a name in the newer technological fields.

Later in 1988, Tozier received visits from St. Petersburg Police Department officials as well as the secretary of state of Wyoming. His growing company developed software applications that created computerized maps for police and emergency vehicles, and also helped deal with voter precinct issues, using digital maps created through census reports.

Some 15 years later, ICW has a host of different clients for many different applications his company provides. His more popular program is GeoElections, an interface for elections supervisors and voters themselves that helps identify where voters are, and where they would vote.

Ken Tozier began International Computer Works, Inc. in 1988, after spending years selling computer systems to major companies.

Showing a sample program under development for Flagler County, Tozier demonstrated how the average voter could benefit from programming developed by ICW. Using precinct and census maps, someone could visit a supervisor of elections Web page, enter their address, and not only have their house located on the map, but also the precinct they would vote in. Clicking on the precinct location pulls up a separate window that has the address and even a photograph of the precinct. When the program is fully developed, Tozier said, clicking on the dot that marks a voter’s address will pull up the sample ballot that is developed specifically for that precinct, which will make it easier to find information on the internet.

Not only would applications like that be beneficial to voters, but it also can be used as an educational tool in the classroom, Tozier said. Teachers can work with students on computers to find their address and precincts as part of civics studies, and take an interactive approach to learning.

“There is only so much you can learn from a textbook,” Tozier said. “This way, not only can you learn, but it’s also tailored to your local needs, and makes it more applicable to the students.”