Oracle to build high school on its campus to train future generation

REDWOOD WOOD CITY, Calif. (KGO) -- It's never been done before. A Silicon Valley corporation will now build a high school on its campus to help train the future generation of techies and engineers. The school is called Design Tech High School and the company is Oracle. It was an idea proposed 17 years ago by its CEO Larry Ellison.

The land was donated and the building for the Design Tech High School will be paid for by Oracle.

The company knows they will come. It was an idea Oracle's CEO Larry Ellison shared with his staff more than 17 years ago. "To better prepare students for the work places of today and tomorrow and again to be the designers of solutions to people's needs and the world's needs," Oracle education fund executive director Colleen Cassity said.

Before Oracle gets all the credit, we should clarify that the concept and model of the school already existed.

The school had been operating in Burlingame since 2013 when it got the attention of Oracle's education fund.

Oracle knew it had to be part of this new way of teaching, modeled after Stanford's school of design. "It's not a production design or fashion design or interior design. Design thinking is a way to solve a problem," Design Tech High School executive director Ken Montgomery said.

Problems like global warming. "A lot of our programs and how we learn are done through projects. It's not like you are sitting in a classroom getting a lecture, you're doing a hands-on activity to help reinforce what you are learning in the classroom," student Nick Dal Porto said.

The school wants to attract more students of color and girls. While it's open to anyone, families living in the San Mateo and Sequoia Union High School Districts would have priority. "If there are more registrants than there are place in a given year, then there's a blind lottery," Cassity said.

The school will open on the Oracle campus in September 2017. The first lesson will be to design a future where everything is possible.