On a Friday afternoon in October 2025, Atlantic City High School wasn’t celebrating another standardized test milestone or a new wing of classrooms. Instead, students, administrators, and industry partners gathered around a red ribbon blocking the entrance to something unprecedented in American public education: a professional-grade esports facility that was simultaneously opening in nine other schools across the district.

Atlantic City Public Schools had just become the first district in the nation to launch esports facilities in every single K-12 building—all at once. Not a pilot program. Not a proof of concept. Ten schools. Seven thousand students. Day one.

“This initiative was about more than just playing video games,” Superintendent Dr. La’Quetta S. Small told the assembled crowd. “The esports program presents an opportunity for students to develop communication, leadership and technical skills—and to explore real-world career pathways in a growing global industry.”

The Classroom Nobody Saw Coming

Gaming has evolved into a global juggernaut worth billions annually, spawning professional leagues, massive audiences, and career paths that didn’t exist a decade ago. Yet most school districts have treated gaming as something to be managed, restricted, or tolerated—rarely as something to be leveraged.

Atlantic City saw a different opportunity. “Gaming is already a billion-dollar industry,” Dr. Small noted, pointing out that content creation alone is “creating new millionaires” around the world. “We want to provide our students with access to that now. We are exposing our students to these types of opportunities while thinking about their futures.”

But here’s where Atlantic City’s approach diverges: this wasn’t about creating a gaming club or fielding a competitive team. The district engineered an entirely integrated learning ecosystem spanning broadcasting, event management, IT infrastructure, marketing, game design, and cybersecurity—career pathways with real-world job prospects that happen to use gaming as the entry point.

“This is a first-of-its-kind, district-wide initiative that connects gaming, learning, and career pathways,” said Michael Bird, Director of Assessments and Special Projects. “It opens the field of exposure for our students, enabling them to engage, collaborate, and compete while building the necessary skills for their future careers.”

Systems Thinking Over Shopping Carts

Most districts start their esports journey the same way: they buy gaming PCs, clear out a room, maybe hire a coach, and hope students show up. Atlantic City understood that this approach—treating esports as an equipment purchase—fundamentally misunderstands what makes gaming a viable career pathway.

Joshua Kell, CEO of Horizon AVL and a key architect of the program, is blunt about why the typical approach fails: “Most districts understandably start with hardware. They buy gaming PCs, set up a room, and hope the program will grow from there. Atlantic City took a fundamentally different approach.”

Instead of treating esports as a simple equipment purchase, the district approached it as a fully integrated learning environment that blends audio-visual systems, broadcast capabilities, networking infrastructure, curriculum design, and competitive platforms into one unified ecosystem.

“This distinction matters because career outcomes do not come from equipment,” Kell explains. “They come from systems. When broadcast rooms, audio, networking, competition platforms, and curriculum are engineered together, students are not simply using devices. They are engaging with real industry workflows.”

During the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Kell emphasized what this means in practice: “Each of the facilities in your schools has been engineered by Horizon AVL and Esports Integration to mirror professional-level esports and broadcast environments. Every facility includes high-performance gaming stations, broadcast and production systems, lighting and LED displays, and dedicated learning spaces.”

Atlantic City’s integrated design ensures that every room mirrors professional environments across broadcast, IT, production, and content creation. When students walk into these esports labs, they’re not just sitting down at gaming rigs—they’re entering environments structured like professional broadcast studios, IT operations centers, and content creation facilities. As Kell puts it: “That is how esports becomes a pathway to careers and not just an extracurricular activity. The infrastructure itself becomes a teaching tool engineered for hands-on learning, not just gaming.”

The platform underpinning this approach is Platform1, a learning management system that connects competitive gaming to project-based learning and academic enrichment. But as Kell emphasizes, making that connection authentic requires much more than adding lessons around gameplay.

“The true operational challenge is ensuring that every system, workflow, and lesson is directly tied to a career pathway,” Kell explains. “Esports Integration solves this by designing environments that reflect real industry settings, by building coursework with measurable competencies that reflect real professional roles, and by ensuring training aligns directly with the hardware students use every day.”

The result is that students don’t simulate professional work—they do it. “Students do not simulate broadcast, production, event management, or IT. They do the real thing in facilities that function the same way professional environments function,” Kell says. “This eliminates the common problem where students only play the game while the career content remains secondary.”

The Anti-Pilot Strategy

Atlantic City made a decision that most risk-averse administrators would never consider: implementing across all ten schools simultaneously rather than starting with a modest pilot program at one or two locations.

On paper, it sounds reckless. In practice, it was precisely what made the program both equitable and sustainable.

“Many districts begin with a small pilot at one or two schools,” Kell observes. “Atlantic City made the decision to implement across all ten schools at once, and that choice significantly affects both equity and long-term sustainability.”

Pilot programs inevitably create divisions. One building gets the new esports lab and all the opportunities that come with it. Students at other schools watch from the sidelines, waiting for budget cycles and approval processes to trickle innovation their way—if it ever comes at all. Kell explains the equity implications: “From an equity standpoint, pilots often create a divide between schools. One building receives opportunities while others wait. Atlantic City ensured that every student from fifth grade through high school had full access on day one. Every building received the same facility standard, the same curriculum, and the same opportunities for competition and workforce development.”

The district-wide approach also creates operational advantages that pilots can’t match. As Kell notes: “From a sustainability standpoint, implementing district-wide creates shared standards across all buildings, a unified curriculum that progresses year over year, consistent staff training, shared competition structures, and purchasing and support efficiencies.”

But here’s the key insight that made this feasible rather than overwhelming: Atlantic City didn’t attempt to manage ten simultaneous buildouts alone. “A project of this scale, with ten facilities built at the same time across an entire district, only works through centralized coordination,” Kell explains. “Atlantic City used Horizon AVL and Esports Integration as its anchor partners to coordinate with others.”

That structure worked because it removed the fragmentation that typically derails large initiatives. “Instead of managing multiple scopes, multiple design philosophies, multiple project managers, and multiple timelines, the district worked with one integrated team that shared one roadmap, one workflow, and one chain of accountability,” Kell says.

If the district had tried to manage separate contracts with each vendor independently, the result would have been predictable chaos. Kell lays out what would have gone wrong: “Equipment would vary by building. Network requirements would conflict. Designs would not align with the curriculum. Timelines would slip because each vendor depends on the others. Staff training would lack standardization.” By consolidating planning, engineering, deployment, and curriculum development through integrated partners, Atlantic City ensured every school delivered the same standard of experience and the same industry-aligned outcomes.

“The reason this was feasible, rather than overwhelming, is that Atlantic City did not attempt to manage the process alone,” Kell emphasizes. “When the roadmap, engineering, curriculum, and support structure are unified, district-wide implementation becomes not only achievable but transformative.”

Career Pathways, Not Just Competition

The facilities themselves are designed to make professional pathways visible and tangible. Michael Bird, serving as emcee for the launch event, laid out the possibilities: “Learn the skills to become a filmmaker, animator or game designer. Dive into the digital world and code your own future as a software engineer or app developer. The possibilities are endless.”

Donald Harris, Director of Secondary Education, explained that the program is being developed as a Career and Technical Education pathway “to help students find direct pathways into high-paying careers.” The goal isn’t to turn every student into a professional gamer. It’s to use gaming as the hook that opens doors to careers in technology, media, event production, business, and digital infrastructure.

Traditional esports programs often suffer from a fundamental disconnect: students play the games while the “career content” exists separately in worksheets or theoretical discussions. Atlantic City engineered its program to eliminate that gap entirely. Broadcasting isn’t a simulation—it’s students operating real equipment to stream live competitions. Event management isn’t hypothetical—it’s coordinating actual tournaments. IT infrastructure isn’t abstract—it’s maintaining networks under competitive pressure.

When the facility itself functions like a professional environment and the curriculum is directly tied to the tools students use every day, career development happens organically rather than as an awkward add-on.

Why This Matters Beyond Atlantic City

Joshua Kell framed the district’s achievement in broader terms: “Atlantic City Public Schools achieved a major milestone, leading the nation with an approach that ties esports directly to future careers. This wasn’t just about playing—it was about learning outcomes and workforce development.”

The implications extend well beyond gaming. Atlantic City demonstrated that districts can meet students where their interests already are and connect those interests to educational and career pathways that grow with them. Instead of asking students to get excited about abstract job titles they’ll encounter a decade from now, the district created environments where students can explore those careers immediately.

This matters particularly for urban districts serving diverse populations. By ensuring every school received identical access to esports facilities and career pathways simultaneously, the district made a clear statement about equity: innovation shouldn’t be something reserved for flagship schools or pilot programs that benefit a select few.

“This groundbreaking program has become a powerful platform that we expect to boost student engagement and connect their interests directly to viable career paths,” Bird said.

The New Standard

Atlantic City’s district-wide esports program represents something larger than a successful technology implementation. It’s a template for how school districts can fundamentally rethink career readiness education by starting with student interests rather than institutional inertia.

For too long, career and technical education has meant steering students toward trades adults believe have merit, with little attention to whether students find those pathways compelling. Atlantic City flipped the equation: start with what students already care about, then engineer rigorous career pathways that leverage that engagement.

As more districts watch Atlantic City’s results, the question won’t be whether esports belongs in schools. The question will be whether schools are willing to build the kind of integrated, system-level infrastructure that makes esports—or any emerging career pathway—genuinely transformative rather than merely supplemental.

Atlantic City didn’t just install gaming computers. The district built a blueprint for what happens when education meets students where they are and gives them the tools to build futures they actually want.

Have questions about the report or scholastic esports?  Feel free to reach out to Esports Foundry’s Chief Gaming Officer and co-author, Chris Postell, at cpostell@esportsfoundry.com