MACHIAS – Washington County is poised to begin Maine’s first countywide distance learning program for elementary and secondary school pupils from Steuben to Eastport.

The Washington County Consortium for School Improvement has received a $549,718 federal grant to install fully interactive video conferencing equipment and the supporting infrastructure in all 38 Washington County schools.

When the project is completed in early 2003, high-speed Internet connections among schools will enable the county’s 5,286 elementary and high school students access to a wide range of courses and experiences, according to Betty Jordan, the consortium’s director.

Students will be able to see and talk to the math, science or foreign language teacher who is teaching them from a school at the other end of the county – and the instructor will be able to see the students.

“We can still be really rural, but we can connect when we want to and our students won’t have to ride all day on a bus,” Jordan said. “It is the best of both worlds.”

Declining enrollments and a subsequent drop in state aid to education have hit Washington County hard in the past few years. As student bodies shrink, the money to pay for programs has evaporated or become increasingly dependent on local property taxes.

Although taxpayers have dug deeply into their pockets, the additional burden has increasingly strained the budgets of small towns with growing numbers of elderly residents. So high schools have begun competing for students and the corresponding increase in state tuition.

Some districts have considered consolidation, but most school administrators have sought a solution that doesn’t require closing community-based schools and busing students around a county that is larger than Rhode Island.

The Washington County Consortium for School Improvement – an association of school superintendents from all nine county school districts, including Maine Indian Education, the Washington County Technical College and the University of Maine at Machias – believes it has found the answer to the problem.

Despite the isolation of many Washington County schools – some of which are down on peninsulas – the consortium’s telecommunications program is designed to provide all students with the same opportunities to learn:

. Advanced-placement classes offered in one high school will be available to students throughout the county.

. Elementary school pupils at the small Wesley School can work on joint projects with grade school children in Machias.

. The handful of children at Jonesboro Elementary can take virtual field trips to museums in Boston.

. Teachers and administrators can attend video conferences for professional development.

The Maine Department of Education has developed a program to connect all high schools in the state through videoconferencing. But the project in Washington County is the first countywide telecommunications program and should be a model for rural counties, Jordan said.

The U.S. Department of Commerce grant for the videoconferencing equipment was announced late last month, but the consortium has been working on the project for more than a year.

Jordan said the consortium received a $50,000 planning grant from the Commerce Department last year and put together a broad-based curriculum and technical committee to design the project.

The planners took a cue from the telemedicine program at the Regional Medical Center at Lubec.

The hospital uses videoconferencing to connect the county’s hospitals and health centers, so the consortium applied that model to the classroom, she said. “Our goal was to integrate all schools in Washington County and share educational resources to improve academic results,” she said

The backbone of the consortium’s telecommunications program will be a state program called ATM.

Run by the state Department of Education, ATM stands for asynchronous transfer mode. It is a broadband fiber-optic networking system that transmits voice, video and data. ATM’s high-speed switching technology allows simultaneous transmission of all types of digital traffic and doesn’t require separate networks to carry voice, data and video.

The ATM program for Maine high schools is not new. In November 1995, Maine voters approved a $15 million bond issue to pay for the technology infrastructure to connect all the state’s high schools, applied technology centers and selected public libraries.

The consortium is working to install ATM in all high schools in the county and will use high-speed lines to connect the elementary and grade schools to that system, Jordan said.

The Lubec hospital will be in charge of installing the videoconferencing equipment in the schools, she said.

Jordan said all schools in the county will have to apply for the reduced Internet connection and service charges they are eligible for under federal law known as the e-rate program, which was sponsored by U.S. Sens. Olympia Snowe of Maine and Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia.

With e-rate, most Washington County school systems will pay anywhere from $57 to $347.50 a month for high-speed Internet service, Jordan said.

Jordan is writing a grant application to line up funding to train teachers how to use the new telecommunications program as a teaching tool – and to evaluate how well it works.

“I really see this as opening doors for kids,” she said. “We need to look at how to expand their worlds and provide an array of courses in the most cost-effective way. This will help.”