Studio pros: Multimedia class at Thompson Falls High provides positive career opportunities

Welcome to Studio XV, the immensely popular, highly respected, innovative and (almost) financially self-sustaining multimedia/vocational education program at Thompson Falls High School.

Former home economics teacher Eve Stuckey, 49, started transforming her traditional home economics classes into a multimedia endeavor 11 years ago. She says she feared traditional home-ec curriculum was becoming irrelevant to the needs of her students.

By JOHN STROMNES of the Missoulian

http://missoulian.com/articles/2004/03/14/territory/territory01.txt

**********

Studio XV Photographic Services

(406)827-3561

**********

Thompson Falls is a relatively remote community tucked away at the bottom of the steep, rock-walled Clark Fork River Canyon about 90 miles west of Missoula.

The area’s unemployment remains among the highest in Montana, good times and bad. That makes job skills all the more important to Thompson Falls students, as is college preparation.

Stuckey, a small, dimpled, vibrant woman originally from New York, was trained as an art educator, and before that she worked in the advertising industry in New York City.

New to Sanders County when she moved here with her husband in the mid-1980s, she recognized some of the problems facing the community.

"Thompson Falls has two great challenges: Isolation and unemployment. Multimedia – photography, desktop publishing, video production – addresses both challenges," she says.

In the big-frame Building 15 housing her programs – that’s how the Studio XV name originated, of course – students are absorbed in a variety of tasks, most of which are computer related. Some are working with digital photographs. There is talking, but no gabbing. There is discussion, but no gossip.

One girl is in the black-and-white photograpy darkroom, immersed in developing traditional film photographs. Other students are working on yearbook details nested deep inside computer files. Some are experimenting with advanced software applications like Adobe Premier and Sonic Foundry – a digital music-composition and performance program.

Some are immersed in Adobe Photoshop using special effects to "rev up" photographs other students had taken with the digital cameras available to all.

Taia Anderson, a senior, one of several talented teaching assistants Stuckey has trained, sits in front of a Dell computer retouching faded photographs from 50 years ago. The photos had been brought in by folks from the community. They wanted them restored, but respectfully so. Gaussian blurs and color filters were not wanted.

Her secret in keeping the feeling of the old prints while improving them in the digitized format?

"When it starts looking professional, you stop," she says.

But she wasn’t so conservative about her own yearbook portrait. She double clicked the mouse to display her retouched portrait on the computer screen.

"For my senior pictures, I used Photoshop to remove all the acne from my face," she says with a sly grin.

Stuckey says she was ready to quit as a home-economics teacher 11 years ago.

"My feeling was that home economics was not going to hang in there. It was so stereotyped – a stagnant format," she says.

But then, Superintendent Jerry Pauli, was hired. She says Pauli welcomed innovative teaching and encouroaged her experiments with traditional home economics curriculum. He also favored "block" scheduling of classes.

The 100-minute periods of block scheduling give students enough time to sustain the creative, independent learning projects favored by Stuckey’s teaching method, Pauli says.

"She’s more of a facilitator than a teacher. The block scheduling has really helped her classes. She does not lecture, and she doesn’t come into class and tell the students what to do. Instead, she encourages students to think on their own, problem solve and work with each other," Pauli says.

In the ensuing years, Stuckey at first transformed, then abandoned completely her old job as home economics teacher. Four years ago, the transition was complete.

She moved entirely out of the home economics department in the main high school building into the new facility behind the high school, and she told the school board that, contrary to the board’s request, she would no longer teach traditional home economics courses like foods and sewing, and she would accept the consequences.

It was an ultimatum, and she knew it.

The school board eventually decided to hire another teacher for traditional home economics curriculum, and since then, Stuckey has been the school’s full-time multimedia teacher in Studio XV.

Studio XV is a nondescript, rectangular, single-story frame structure, at least from the outside. Inside, it was designed, constructed and "wired" into a vast computer network by students, helped by teachers (with plans approved by the school’s consulting architect and work approved by state building inspector, Pauli says.)

That students had a hand in constructing the studio is typical of Stuckey’s emphasis on relevant, hands-on vocational education.

"We gutted and installed new hardware and software, connected cables, and solved a vast array of glitches and bugs so all the computers would be linked. We learned much about the inside of the computer, as well as setting up a computer network," says Justin Calhoun, a student of Stuckey’s during that period.

Inside the building, there are no individual student desks. Instead, zippy Dell computers with Intel Pentium 4 chips line the walls. Unlike most technology classrooms, there are far more computers available than students.

Photography equipment – tripods, studio lights, cameras and backdrops – is tucked away here and there. It is used for portraits and commercial photography the students do for projects like the school yearbook and for local businesses like Crowder Knives.

Studio XV provides all the photographic services for the knife-maker’s brochures and Web site.

Studio XV incorporates a complete television and video production studio, and students are responsible for operation and maintenance of the community’s low-power public TV station, which is transmitted both on cable and via a transceiver on a mountain top near Thompson Falls.

Students also operate a digital photo-restoration business – one of the many commercial offshoots of Studio XV over the last few years. Students have painstakingly restored faded negative images from the 1930s -era Civilian Conservation Corps camps near Thompson Falls.

The restored images are framed (another Studio XV business enterprise) and displayed in the local historical museum.

To do photo restoration and many other tasks in the studio, students learn Photoshop, the digital-photography software that has revolutionized graphic arts and photography in the last decade.

With Photoshop, students produce and desktop publish the school’s annual yearbook, saving the district (and students who buy the yearbook) thousands of dollars in commercial publishing fees.

Stuckey says her students produce a better yearbook than the professional firm that used to do it, at far less cost.

Although Stuckey’s students do the photography, copy, ad sales, and layout of the year book on disc, the actual printing and binding is outsourced to the local weekly newspaper and a publishing firm in Oregon.

She also is on the constant lookout for grants and donations of both money and equipment. Her program won a coveted, and highly competitive $38,000 Perkins grant for excellence in vocational education a few years back.

But school is not all Photoshop games.

To bring in revenue for the yearbook, students hit the streets selling yearbook ads to local businesses.

"I’ve nested vocational and art programs together," Stuckey says.

Television productions developed by her students have included live broadcasts of political campaign forums, a video on dating violence, numerous consumer affairs videos, and four highly successful advertising spots for the Sanders County Fair a few years back.

Payment for the ad production was a $100 donation to the class for video equipment, and 12 all-day tickets to the carnival for the students. The ads were broadcast on commercial stations in Kalispell, Missoula and Spokane, and fair attendance soared.

Students have also put on a film festival, and shot a video production featuring the String Orchestra of the Rockies (the Great-Falls based group visits the community annually for live performances) that has been shown on PBS stations across the state. One independent video by a Studio XV student won a national award.

Her students also design Web sites. But she strictly limits Internet access.

"We’re connected to the Internet. But I have a disconnect switch. I’m not a huge fan of the Internet in a classroom. They’ll screw around, do e-mail or just get off task," she says.

Stuckey’s classes are "in the round." That is, there is no teacher’s podium in the front facing rows of student desks. Indeed, there are no student desks. The students have no hardcover textbooks, and she has no blackboard, no chalk, no pencils or erasers. She has even dispensed with that staple of tired educational assessment, multiple-choice tests.

"I got rid of all those things. They are barriers to teaching. I’m more of a facilitator rather than a teacher," Stuckey says.

During a typical day, the students wander here and there, collaborating with one another on a variety of technical tasks, and enter and leave the building at will.

"I believe that technology is forcing the educational process to change," Stuckey says.

Throughout the day, Stuckey stays in the background. Occasionally, she answers a question when a student approaches her, but more often she directs inquiries from less advanced students to her "TA’s", or teaching assistants, the experienced, upper-level students who Stuckey says are the real teachers at Studio XV.

"I’ve got a whole roomful of brains willing to help me teach. I learn from them and they learn from me," she says.

The students take Stuckey’s classes all four years of their high school education. She has never flunked anybody. Since it is an elective class, only highly motivated students seem to apply, and she would discourage anyone who was obviously not motivated "but I’ve never had to do it."

Many Studio XV graduates have gone to work immediately out of high school in graphic arts, radio and television production jobs all across the country, Pauli says.

Those who go to post-secondary schools – a relatively high percentage, he says – have told him Stuckey’s class was excellent preparation for demanding technical tasks in college and technical schools.

"This is a mesh of art, technology and vocational education. They call my class Hotel California. Once I get them involved in multimedia, I don’t let them go," Stuckey says.

Reporter John Stromnes can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or [email protected]