AT THE CENTER OF Redwood City, Calif., lies Sequoia High, the oldest high school in the Peninsula region of the San Francisco Bay area. Founded in 1895, the school's main edifice was built in 1924, after an earthquake toppled the original building. Sequoia's sun-drenched Spanish Renaissance tower is still majestic, belying the fortunes of the school itself.

On the hill to the west of the school lies a tony residential enclave. Here, the average home value approaches $2 million. Across the railroad tracks to the east, by contrast, are the so-called flatlands, where most residents rent tiny slab houses valued at a fraction of their highbrow neighbors' homes. Students from both sides of the tracks like to refer to their town -- without affection -- as Deadwood City.

Sequoia High, like many Redwood City schools, has in fact verged on the moribund in recent years. Decades of low test scores resulted in the widespread flight of well-heeled white students to private schools. Today, the majority of students are of Latino heritage. Many live below the poverty line. Home PCs and Internet access have not been a fixture in most Sequoia students' lives, but technology is a fixture of the community itself. With its stellar weather and convenient location between San Francisco and San Jose, Redwood City has become something of a high-tech mecca in the past year or so. Companies such as broadband services provider Excite@Home, IP telephony vendor Clarent Corp. and market researcher Zona Research make their headquarters in shiny chrome-and-glass buildings here. Cisco Systems, Oracle and Sun Microsystems are just down the street from Sequoia in neighboring towns. Though they are surrounded by need -- hundreds of economically disadvantaged schoolchildren -- these vendors have not always seen themselves as potential white knights. But that is slowly changing as some vendors have begun investing in the local schools -- donating equipment, participating in job-shadowing programs, creating internships -- doing their part to make President Clinton's dream of ubiquitous Internet access for every schoolchild in America a reality. Redwood City in particular has been seeking ways to close the digital divide as local educators have begun building a comprehensive, multitiered IT curriculum for all school levels.

But while school officials have been happy to get vendors' attention in the form of equipment and training programs, they have been disappointed by the low level of time and commitment these vendors have been willing to devote to the comprehensive IT education project currently under way. And, of course, these companies are not just out to be model corporate citizens. Scratch the surface of these burgeoning efforts, and you'll find they are all to a greater or lesser degree motivated by the high-tech vendors' desire to reduce the short- and long-term IT labor shortage by immersing students in technology when they are young. Another barely concealed motive is to indoctrinate young people in vendor-specific technology (such as Cisco's networking technology or Oracle Internet standards) to widen that

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