Computer class

• By ED CULLEN
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Nov 2, 2009

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“One day, we’ll be mining landfills for this stuff,” said Nancy Jo Craig, waving a hand at disemboweled computers in the workshop warrens of Capital Area Corporate Recycling Council.

Craig, CACRC’s executive director, was talking about the precious metals inside personal computers. CACRC, housed in an old brick-walled warehouse in Catfish Town, mines donated and junked computers for components that staff technicians use to build computers for low-income families.

Some of those computers — refurbished Hewlett-Packard PCs and flat-screen monitors — are in use at the East Baton Rouge Parish Carver Branch Library on Terrace Street as part of a computer class sponsored by CACRC and the Center for Planning Excellence (CPEX).

Students ranging in age from early 20s to late 60s are enrolled in a 10-session course on successive Saturdays.

“They start with working computers,” said CACRC’s Zachary Pyle, 22, the course’s instructor.

Under Pyle’s supervision, students take the computers apart to learn what each component does.

“Then, they put them back together. The computer they build they get to keep. We’ll see that it works,” Pyle said.

“We teach the hardware,” Craig said. “This is a class for people who want to know what RAM looks like.”

Among the things the application form designed by CPEX asks is income level, whether or not a prospective student is unemployed and how they found out about the class, said Stacy Strohschein, CPEX’s 24-year-old communications and redevelopment intern.

CPEX is talking to Cajun Clickers, a computer club in Baton Rouge, about teaching a class, she said.

“We’re in the beginning stages of designing a project that can grow into something substantial,” said Susan Ludwig, CPEX’s director of redevelopment.

The computer class fits CPEX’s interest in the economic revitalization of what’s come to be called Old South Baton Rouge.

Known to generations of residents as “The Bottom,” CPEX defines Old South Baton Rouge as that part of Baton Rouge from the interstate downtown to the north gates of LSU and from River Road to Dalrymple Drive and Park Boulevard.