Forget a high-priced Web design firm. When Courtney Tice needed a Web site for Monart, her recently opened Folsom-based art-school franchise, she enlisted the help of some unlikely candidates: high school students. "I enjoy computer work, but my passion is art," Tice said. "Plus, being a master teacher, I just don't have the time to do it myself." Tice contacted the student Web wizards at Granite Bay High School, who maintain the school's own site as well as take occasional outside jobs. The school's Web design program is just one part of a three-pronged class at the school dubbed GBiT, which stands for Granite Bay Information Technology. The for-credit elective, now in its seventh year, is part "Geek Squad," part Web factory and a whole lot of career prep, giving students a taste of what life is like working in high tech. "This really is a fantastic program," said Bryan Sebesta, a junior who heads up the Web development team for GBiT, which was recently named a finalist in the Sacramento Dottie awards for the site granitebayhigh.org. "You get to develop tech skills, but it's also fun and you're learning life skills too." GBiT students work in one of three departments: Management and Development, which trains groups and individuals - mostly teachers - in software; the Web Group, the Web design branch; and Technical Services, an on-call tech-support group that helps keep the more than 450 computers and related peripherals on campus in working order. Each department comes with its own set of supervisors and managers, and the entire operation is headed by a student CEO. This semester, that's senior Jesjit Birak. "This is just like a job," said Birak, who described his duties as mainly keeping projects on track. "Everything I do in this class is directly related to the business world." Begun seven years ago with some initial help from Intel, GBiT students are not only learning valuable skills, but are also augmenting the district's technology personnel - especially when it comes to tech support, said GBiT teacher Mike Fischer. "We basically didn't have adequate tech support for the computers we had, so Intel helped draw up a plan whereby students did tech support on campus," he said. "Now, students are closing more than 900 calls a year." All those calls ring into a dedicated answering machine in a small side space inside the GBiT classroom. For each request for service, students in the tech-support division open a "ticket" on a tracking database, then don official GBiT name badges and make house calls to classrooms. There, they'll find problems running the gamut from bum hard drives to fried motherboards. "And AV equipment is huge," Birak said, referring to the audio-visual equipment that's ubiquitous in today's schools. "It's mainly AV and hardware. Those are the big ones." It all has the feeling of a real-life tech startup, said Patrick Thomas, a former GBiT student who recently accepted a job as a software engineer at Intuit, the Palo Alto-based software firm. He credits his time in the Granite Bay program as helping prepare him for college and the workforce. "It's pretty amazing, having that experience early in your career and seeing how management planning is done right," said the 22-year-old Thomas, who is completing a computer science degree at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. "It gives you really a feel for when you get into college or the workforce - you already know it can be done better." While the program sometimes forces students to be educators to their teachers, the adults seem to handle the reversal of roles well. "There was never a trust issue," said Tice, the Monart owner. "What I was really impressed with was how professionally I was treated." Jan Pinney, a Roseville Joint Union High School District board member, agreed. He's hired several GBiT students for IT jobs at his Granite Bay-based insurance company. "They're good listeners, they ask good questions, manage their time well and they are goal-oriented," he said of the program's products. "And they're good communicators; one of the things I find with most tech people is they speak a different language than I do, but these kids don't." According to the California Employment Development Department, technology-related careers are projected to boom over the next seven years. Despite the dot-com bust, the agency is projecting double-digit growth in a number of tech career categories, such as software engineering, tech support and information system management. To that end, district administrators are planning to bring a GbiT-like program to other schools in the district, and a pilot program at Oakmont High is currently in the works, said Ron Severson, Executive Director of Curriculum and Instruction. In the meantime, students at Granite Bay are ready to put their skills to work for the community. For more information, visit www.granitebayhigh.org/gbit, or call 786-8676, ext. 5678. - Nathan Donato-Weinstein can be reached at nathand@goldcountrymedia.com.