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In Support of the Move

George Coates
Tuesday August 19, 2003

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As a faculty member of the Berkeley Adult School, I support the School District's plan to move the Adult School to the Franklin School site. The present west campus facility is inadequate for teaching courses in some subjects including the course I teach, Public Speaking for the Camera, which must be taught again this fall at a temporary facility provided by Berkeley's public access TV station a mile away.  

The Franklin School is a choice location for adult students seeking to develop skills in communications and electronic media because Franklin includes an oversized multi-purpose room called the Cafetorium, ideal for serving double duty as both classroom space and media sound-stage. With its level floor, windowless walls and high ceiling, students learning English As a Second Language, for example, can monitor their own progress using TelePrompTers mounted on video cameras to improve their public speaking skills.  

With a no cost up-link to the public access cable channels provided by contract agreement with Comcast, student work, neighborhood community meetings, cultural events and class projects taking place at the Adult School can be broadcast throughout the city from west Berkeley's emerging arts district.  

Moving the Berkeley Adult School to the Franklin School with its uniquely flexible Cafetorium provides an opportunity for the adult population in Berkeley to develop media literacy in the growing field of independent media without having to travel off campus to do it. Renovations to the current west campus facility would be too costly to produce the space flexibility that already exists just three blocks away at the Franklin School site.  

Moving the Berkeley Adult School is in the best interest of faculty and students eager to benefit from an improved quality of adult education that the Franklin School site makes possible. And the Franklin School neighborhood will benefit from a vibrant and thriving learning center to replace the abandoned school building and crime sponge that sits there now.  

George Coates