Adil Lalani was still in high school when he conceived the idea for SurfYourWork.com, a free, web-based school management system that lets teachers and administrators post assignments and other documents online for students and parents to view and download. Now, little more than a year later, a New York-based educational software provider has purchased the product, prompting schools across the country to take a serious look at this one-time classroom project--while reportedly making Lalani, 19, a millionaire in the process.

The company--Jasmine Technologies Inc.--reportedly offered Lalani, who currently is enrolled at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, $1.25 million in cash and stock for his fledgling, one-man technology outfit. Jasmine, which helps U.S. schools meet the demands of the No Child Left Behind Act with technological solutions designed to increase student-teacher interaction and include more parents in their children's education, also took Lalani on as full-time employee, promising him a place to continue his pursuit of a career in computer engineering when he graduates.

Lalani, who first resisted taking his product into the commercial space, said he agreed to the deal after realizing the difficulties inherent in trying to run a start-up technology firm from his dorm room.

"The money helped," said Lalani in a recent interview with eSchool News. But mainly, it was the challenge of maintaining his grades. "I didn't want to see this turn into a disaster," he said. "The [product] was taking up a lot of time ... I still had to worry about my marks."

Through an agreement with his university, Lalani will go to school part time over the next four months, devoting the majority of his days--at least 40 hours a week--to Jasmine's acquisition and continued development of SurfYourWork.com. He then plans to head back to school and finish up his degree before returning to Jasmine to work on the product full time.

At its most basic level, SurfYourWork.com allows teachers to assign homework to individual students. Teachers also can attach files, such as PDFs or Microsoft Word documents, to each homework assignment, providing students with continuous access to resources online and saving schools unnecessary printing costs. Students then turn their assignments back in to their teachers through the system, alleviating the need for paper-based transactions. It also provides a means for parents to see and access students' work online and for administrators to post events and perform other administrative and calendaring functions.

Lalani originally developed the web site for his eleventh-grade computer science independent study unit at Lower Canada College, a K-12 private school in Montreal. The goal he set for himself was to learn the web programming languages PHP and MySQL by developing an online homework community that would be more intuitive and enticing for students and teachers to use. Lalani said he grew tired of watching frustrated teachers and classmates attempting to manipulate these often hard-to-manage systems.