New Technology High School - New Tech

New Technology High School is a secondary school located in Napa, California.

The school was founded in 1997 as a joint project of the Napa Valley Unified School District and the business community of the Napa Valley. Vincent “Buzz” Butler of Lake Street Ventures, the developer of the Napa Junction Center in American Canyon, played a pivotal role in founding New Tech High, and by extension, the development of the new teaching method. “If I had to pick one man as the father of SC21, it would be Buzz Butler,” said Napa County Office of Education Superintendent Barbara Nemko. Nemko became the director of the business and education collaboration committee shortly after her arrival in Napa in 1991. New Tech High School was an outgrowth of that committee. “Business people were unhappy with the quality of workers they were getting. The average schools weren’t producing graduates with skills needed in the workplace,” said Butler. “So I thought, ‘why can’t we grow our own employees? Why not teach these kids what these companies want?’” That s imple question led to a one-of-a-kind business-education partnership. Butler said the idea for an education-business collaboration came from his internship in his senior year at UC Berkeley with a professor who typically acted as a matchmaker between students and businesses. To their credit, Butler said, local educators and administrators were open to the possibilities. “There may be 42 SC21-type schools around the country, but we are the first to take it district-wide,” said Nemko.

New Tech Network

One business community member, Ted Fujimoto, was instrumental in visioning the education model. Napa New Technology High School is the first of over 80 schools based on this model across the United States. The school is a National Model School and Center for Secondary special education School Reform Showcase School, and received the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation replication grant.

The New Technology Foundation was established in 2000 to replicate the model.

The New Technology High School model's primary mode of instruction is Project Based Learning (PBL). The school model's implementation of Project Based Learning was originally derived from project management protocols used by teams at Napa-based company Landmark Consulting Group, Inc. (a company owned by Ted Fujimoto) for software development and business process reengineering projects.

The school originally used Lotus Notes groupware software with custom templates to aid in project team collaboration and communication. These templates were modified for school use from Landmark Consulting Group's project templates.

Later, the New Technology Foundation migrated the entire system to be web-basedâ€"now called Echo.

In 2009, The New Technology Foundation was acquired by the KnowledgeWorks Foundation and is now called the New Tech Network.