District Wide Web

By Brett Schaeffer

Leaders of the Lemon Grove School District in Southern California have put their own spin on that old real estate adage, the one about "location." If the question is how to improve instruction for 4,600 students in a cash-strapped K- 8 district, their answer is, "Innovation, innovation, innovation."

The man who practically invented the mantra is a 39-year-old named Darryl La Gace (rhymes with "face"), a Lemon Grove alumnus. Ten years ago, he suggested that district officials use a $164,000 surplus in the general operating budget to build, of all things, a microwave transmission tower. Eventually, he told them, it would allow schools to share a wireless Internet connection.

Imagine, in 1992, what this must have sounded like. "We knew what microwave ovens were," recalls Becky Riedel, president of the Lemon Grove Teachers' Association and a special ed teacher in the district since 1979. But most folks, back then, knew nothing of the Internet and had little experience with computers. La Gace might as well have been asking the district to build him a rocket for...