Housed in a former elementary school and tucked away in a quiet suburban neighborhood in Fairfax County, the campus of the Nancy F. Sprague Technology Center seems an unlikely place for a modern technological marvel.

Walking through the green-tiled hallways, past a row of old aluminum lockers, I'm still not convinced. This is the epicenter of one of the nation's most technologically advanced school systems? I ask myself, keeping quiet long enough to give my hosts the benefit of the doubt. It certainly doesn't look like anything special.

We come to a door. I look up and hear our tour guide, Donna Franklin, coordinator of the school district's Multimedia Service Center, say in a whisper, "And this ... is Master Control."

Before I even walk through the door, I'm already thinking: Unbelievable.

In front of us, a woman sits staring up at a giant terminal on which several images appear. A computer screen flashes in the foreground, and she reaches for the keyboard, punching some buttons. Multicolored lights--reds and greens, blues--flash in my periphery. Servers and processors hum with activity. In a matter of seconds, we've stepped from an unremarkable office building into a room that resembles a scaled-down version of NASA's Mission Control.

Franklin doesn't say a word. She just stands there, watching, as we take it all in.

Awe and surprise, she would tell us later, are not uncommon reactions for first-time visitors to the Sprague Center, which serves as a central hub for the production, development, and delivery of all education-related multimedia content for the Fairfax County Public Schools' more than 240 schools and office buildings.

Among its many attributes, the center boasts a professional-grade television production studio, complete with video and sound mixing rooms, and the appropriately named "Master Control," the main distribution engine behind every piece of audio and video content produced and broadcast by the school system.

Instead of a tape-based system, where video must be recorded and then edited by members of a production crew in the confines of a special video editing room equipped with tape decks, Fairfax County uses optical disc technology, which lets producers take images recorded on disc and edit them directly on their desktop computer, using video editing software.

The finished product then can be sent from the desktop directly to producers in Master Control, where it can be automatically inserted into the programming lineup.

The transition to disc and digital media has allowed for a lot more "flexibility and efficiency" in production, says Franklin: "It's much better than carrying all those tapes around."

Eventually, she said, the goal is to have a system in place where producers can edit the video and then drag-and-drop the finished program directly into the production queue from their desktop, though Fairfax isn't quite there yet.