"This is part of a no-holds-barred corporate strategy to target kids no matter where they are -- online, in school or in their bedrooms," says Chester, who agrees with other critics who view these ventures as a digital Trojan horse for corporate efforts to control the buying and spending habits of children.

Schoolchildren represent the largest untapped consumer market in the country, says David Walsh, president of the National Institute on Media and the Family in Minneapolis. "Where better to go after kids than where they are held captive for six hours a day."

What especially alarms critics is the potential for corporate snooping and spying on students. Utilizing the two-way nature of the Internet, ZapMe, HiFusion and other companies can gather personal data from children, such as name, address, sex, school location, Web-surfing habits, even parents' credit card numbers -- information that can be provided to outside marketers. This policy has prompted critics like Ralph Nader to call ZapMe a "corporate predator" and the "Big Brother" of schools. An unlikely coalition of liberal activists and religious conservatives, including Nader and Phyllis Schlafly, are leading a national campaign to oust the company from public schools.

Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., along with Sens. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., and Richard Shelby, R-Ala., recently introduced legislation that would require schools to get parental permission before a company could collect or distribute marketing data on students. Schools that did not comply could lose their eligibility for federal funding. "If parents do not want their children to be objects of market research firms while in school, they should have the right to say no," Miller says.

Rick Inatome, ZapMe's CEO since November, insisted in an interview "that the company had never collected personal data on students" and that aggregate data is collected for "internal use" only. Inatome said ZapMe is sensitive to the issue of privacy, even going so far as to hire the firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers to conduct independent privacy audits of its network. "I've changed the focus of the company away from commercialism and marketing to education," said Inatome. He said school contracts this fall will reflect this change. ZapMe's current contract states that it may ask students for "personal information" and that it may "compile statistics and demographics" about the "viewing habits" of users and distribute them "for commercial purposes." A draft of the new contract indicates that some of this wording has been dropped, but nowhere is it explicitly stated that ZapMe has stopped online profiling.

Arnold F. Fege, president of Public Advocacy for Kids, a Washington education consulting group, is skeptical of ZapMe's intentions, as he is about those of other companies that claim to self-police their privacy policy. "In this instance, silence is not golden. Any school that signs a contract like this should insist on explicit guarantees that there will be no online profiling of students, teachers or parents," Fege says.

One educator who's resisting the corporate come-ons is Bill Dierdorf, business manager for the North Clackamas public school district near Portland, Ore. Dierdorf says he is showered daily with offers from companies for computers, Internet access, e-mail accounts, curriculum packages, even mouse pads covered with ads. "We were approached by ZapMe and other vendors, but we rejected them," Dierdorf says. "We don't believe we should sell out our kids to the highest bidder. Our job is to educate them, not to bombard them with ads."

Dierdorf says it's usually lower-income districts like his, not well-funded ones, that are the most eager clients of ZapMe and Channel One. "It's a shortsighted solution that buys some time. But schools won't be better off in long run." Indeed, such deals may undermine poorer school districts' ability to attract state funds or develop an appropriate technology plan. The danger is that school administrators will become dependent on corporate handouts, and forget that it was the failure to provide schools with adequate public funding that led them to the begging bowl in the first place.

The debate over ZapMe will be familiar to anyone who has followed the saga of Channel One. The daily news program for teenagers reaches more than 8 million students every school day, five times the number of teens who watch network and cable newscasts combined. Yet the network has been under fire since flamboyant media entrepreneur Chris Whittle launched it in 1990. (It is now owned by Primedia Inc.)

Last year, Channel One's practices were scrutinized by the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, and the network has come under renewed attack from children's groups. In response, Channel One has mounted an intense lobbying effort in Washington against its critics. Jeff Balabon, executive vice president for public policy at Primedia, characterizes such critics as "extremist anti-business and anti-technology groups with an anti-capitalist agenda." Yet even Balabon makes an effort to distinguish Channel One, which he says provides "real news content," from ZapMe and companies like it. Although Channel One is said to be developing an in-school ad-driven Internet program of its own, Balabon denies it will based on the ZapMe model.

Still, Fege says, Channel One has joined with ZapMe and other education-technology companies in opposing the Miller parental consent law. "I've never seen a fiercer lobbying effort against a piece of education legislation," Fege says. "These companies are going ballistic over these bills, because they see their passage as the beginning of the end of marketing to kids in school."

Meanwhile, this summer has seen even more ambitious efforts by public school systems to reap benefits from the Internet. In June, for example, the New York school board unanimously approved a proposal to create its own revenue-generating Web site and portal. According to school officials, the portal will be the fifth largest in the world and will help pay the costs of providing free or leased laptop computers to all 1.1 million public school students in the city through advertising and e-commerce opportunities. "Everyone else is cashing in on the new economy, why not schools?" says Paul Wooten, a member of the school board's Cyberspace Task Force.

After the scheme was harshly criticized by the newly formed New York Coalition for Commercial-Free schools, the board promised to shield children, though not teachers, from any direct advertising. But the coalition is asking the school board to postpone a scheduled September 13 vote on the proposal until it can be reviewed at a public hearing.

At Colorado Springs' Harrison High School, students are largely unimpressed by the debate over their ZapMe computer lab. "Sure, the ads can be distracting," says one 16-year-old junior, adding that he doesn't see anything unusual about being pitched at in school. After all, he says, "we see ads everywhere we go. It just seems natural." And about the possibility that students' every mouse click could be monitored from afar? "Big deal," replies another student. "That starts the day you get a Social Security number."

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