EDUCATION REMAINS STRONG
Poplar Forest Newsletter, Fall 2003

This year, the broadcast of “Shaping the World: Conversations on Democracy” featured conversation among Thomas Jefferson, Captain Meriwether Lewis, and the 7th grade students of Central Academy Middle School of Fincastle, Virginia.   The interactive broadcast again was beamed to schools throughout Virginia on the state Education Department’s satellite system and aired on Virginia’s public television stations.

However, this year’s production is reaching an even wider audience as it airs for the first time on the Department of Education’s Staff Development Hour.  Broadcast on public television stations on Tuesdays, the Staff Development Hour’s purpose is to provide material that teachers can use to meet the Standards of Learning established by the state and increase student achievement.  Many school systems only have satellite capability in their high schools; but because all schools have access to the Staff Development Hour, the democracy program now is accessible to a larger number of teachers and students. 

The democracy program’s fall broadcasts followed a full summer agenda of field schools at Poplar Forest in archaeology and restoration, including one for children and three for adults.  The archaeology field school for teachers this year had to expand to two full sessions in order to meet the demand for this teaching tool. 

When financial prudence in an uncertain economic climate required budget reduction this season, education remained a fundamental priority.  To ensure that the hands-on history program for school children had the resources it needed to meet teacher demand, Poplar Forest canceled an event and diverted those resources to this educational program.  Likewise, given reduced staff and the necessity to commit now to its 2004 schedule, Poplar Forest made the difficult decision to cut back the tour schedule for the general public in 2004 to six days a week, instead of daily, in order to allocate staff resources to sustain its commitment to educational programming for school children.  

“If the economy improves in 2004,” said executive director Lynn A. Beebe, “the resources we would have used to support the seventh day can go to develop exciting new educational pilot projects for both adults and children.”