The Small School That Launched the Future First

Imagine designing a high school with no gymnasium. No science lab with a ventilation hood. No kitchen for culinary arts, no workshop, no fabrication space. Just a small building, a handful of teachers who care, and a student body that had already learned, in one way or another, that traditional school wasn’t built for them.

That’s La Crosse Polytechnic — Poly, to everyone who knows it — a 6–12 public charter school of roughly 80 to 90 students within the School District of La Crosse, Wisconsin. It sits in a genuinely diverse community where nearly 37% of district students qualify for free or reduced-price meals and the median household income falls meaningfully below the state median. This is a story about a public school system, serving real families with real economic pressures, choosing to invest in tools that open doors.

Poly had been sitting on an unspent grant. The money was there. The vision wasn’t. Then Bethany Nugent, the district’s technology integration specialist and an Apple Distinguished Educator, looked at the school’s missing labs and missing spaces and saw a design problem. If students couldn’t physically access the experiences their peers at larger schools enjoyed, could immersive technology become the building Poly didn’t have?

In the fall of 2024, La Crosse Polytechnic became the first school in the world to launch Apple Vision Pro at scale in a K–12 setting, a distinction confirmed by Apple itself. 

The headsets were never the point. From day one, Bethany and teacher Jason Krug were unequivocal: pedagogy first, technology second. The instructional anchor was a question Bethany asked at the start and Jason answered every single day — what are students actually doing with this? The answers grew richer by the month. Students explored global tourism by standing, virtually, in the places they were studying. They captured their own spatial photography and video on iPhones and watched their content appear immersively inside the Vision Pro. As one student put it: “I’ve watched videos about these places before, but this feels like I’m actually there, and that makes me care more about understanding what’s happening.”

The outcomes are the kind that stop you in the hallway. One student with significant social anxiety and a history of non-verbal classroom engagement delivered a fully realized immersive tour to her peers, a full, confident presentation to the room, and her verbal communication and classroom confidence have held in the months since. Students developed expert-level device knowledge organically, answering each other’s questions mid-class, headsets still on. Watching adults learn a brand-new technology in real time alongside students normalized struggle and made risk-taking feel like the expected thing rather than the brave thing. And a cold email to an app developer grew into a genuine partnership: Poly now regularly advises developers on COPPA and FERPA compliance, functioning as a de facto education partner for companies building for schools for the first time.

Ask Bethany what she’s learned, and her answer is immediate: speak your crazy. “If you have a dream and you don’t say it out loud, nothing happens,” she says. “The worst that happens when you say it is that you get a no. And in our case, we’ve gotten so many yeses.”

In a national moment when the conversation about technology in schools has narrowed to fear — screens, distraction, disconnection — La Crosse Polytechnic offers a different story. Eighty students. Six teachers. A building without a gym. And a team that refused to let what the building lacked define what its students could do. The technology opened a door students could actually walk through.

Read the full story, and more like it, in Purposeful Technology, Powerful Learning: You Can’t Ban Possibility, by Stacy Hawthorne, Ed.D., CETL. ® Coming this September 2026. Learn more here.

Published September 8, 2026

AUTHOR: Dr. Stacy Hawthorne, CETL, serves as the Chair of the CoSN Board of Directors and Executive Director of the EdTech Leaders Alliance.

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