In early 2004, Matt Federoff, the director of technology for Arizona's growing Vail School District, along with the district's superintendents, and Cindy Lee, the designated principal of the district's soon-to-be-opened Empire High School, visited four one-to-one programs. Although Empire High School's mission—"to provide teachers with a variety of resources and to prepare students for the real world"—differed from the more traditional goals of the other schools, Federoff, Lee, and the superintendents saw one-to-one as key for real-world preparation.

They brainstormed ways they might fund such a program—and more important, exactly how they might utilize it to meet their district-wide goal. They concluded that if they got rid of textbooks and computer labs they would have nearly enough to pay for the laptop program. But, without textbooks, where would the curriculum come from?

Federoff remembers this as a crucial moment. Keeping their goal in mind, they decided to develop a curriculum driven by state standards and to use resources, whether print or digital, that align with those standards. Now in its third year, Empire High’s "inverted" curricular model has proven key to innovation and is recognized community wide as necessary and natural to success.

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