The pioneering educational experiment was going along fine, by most accounts. Students, teachers, administrators, parents and helpful community members were using a school-based system to hook up via computer and phone lines not only to each other, but also to a vast international communications and information network.

Students here were exchanging messages with students in Korea, Germany, Sweden, Iceland and elsewhere. Classroom-to-classroom projects were humming out to New York City, the former Soviet Union and elsewhere. Teachers and tutors were communicating from home with students over weekends and vacation periods.

What made it all the more impressive, however, was that the cradle of this high-tech project was not some wealthy suburban district, but the cash-strapped, lumbering, disrespected Chicago Public Schools.

Who would have thought? Chicago, along with New York and Boston, had put itself in the vanguard of telecommunications education with CPSNET, a bulletin board and electronic-mail system launched in 1989 and operated from Board of Education headquarters with little fanfare and no publicity on a tiny budget.

Then, almost as if the bureaucracy did a double-take and said, "Whoa, this can't be! We're the Chicago Public Schools!" officials on Pershing Road began to tinker with CPSNET.

Three out of five volunteer system operators-computer jocks who oversaw the network, worked to improve it and helped troubleshoot-were dismissed six weeks ago for vague and uncompelling reasons, as was Dennis Tokoph, 37, a former volunteer who had become CPSNET's system administrator and only paid staff member.

"I guess they got worried they'd do something right," said George Schmidt, an English teacher at Amundsen High School who has 100 students signed up.

Shortly after the purge, CPSNET began requiring all users, even those with existing access, to register by regular mail with the Board of Education. In the past, users could register via computer, and the new procedure has left many would-be users, such as Amundsen principal Edward Klunk, in limbo.

"The central office is confused on how to run the system," said Klunk, who praised the numerous educational applications and benefits of CPSNET. "Our schools are in the dark ages in so many respects, and now once we get ahead in this one area, they try to take it away."

Users began to report that electronic mail was often delayed in delivery and sometimes never reached its destination at all. This prompted Schmidt and others to raise the specter of censorship in CPSNET bulletin board messages, on a radio talk show and in a monthly newspaper for teachers.

But Tokoph, the fired system administrator who is now working for the Detroit Public Schools to set up a similar electronic bulletin board, said he suspects that what looks like censorship is probably just poor management of a now overburdened system. Every piece of electronic mail on CPSNET must be read and, in effect, forwarded on by system operators, all but two of whom were given the heave-ho.

Tokoph used to scan most of the mail himself and said he could tell great stories about the love lives of teachers. Even though a notice on the system alerts users that CPSNET electronic mail is not private, "I'd guess half the people weren't aware of it," Tokoph said.

They should be by now. The controversy has made most users aware of the official nose in their files and shattered confidence in the system, said Tokoph. He said he still can log in to CPSNET's compact mainframe computer from his home in Des Plaines, and he has seen the number of people logging in per day fall by some 30 percent in recent weeks, as well as a sharp drop in the number of posted public messages.

"It's a morgue," said Ben Teifeld, 30, a Glencoe computing and education consultant who was one of the leading proselytizers for CPSNET until he was dumped as a volunteer system operator. "A chill has settled in. No one feels really free to exchange ideas."

Chicago Schools spokesman David Rudd said the dismissals were for "abuses of the system," such as system operators offering consulting services for sale on bulletin boards and overusing telephone credit cards. Tokoph said he was told he was fired for giving special access privileges without proper authorization.

Bubkes, in other words.

"There are three issues here," said Teifeld. "Reliability, accessibility and privacy. All of these have gone downhill in the last six weeks. And the board has never explained why the changes were necessary. How was the system not working?"

Rudd said the system was, indeed, working well until the alleged abuses were found. He had no information about the reported dropoff in use.

Schmidt and several of the fired operators speculated that CPSNET was purged and reined in for the same reason it was never widely publicized-because administrators became wary of the potential power of instantaneous, grass-roots, citywide communication between local school councils, teachers, students and parents.

Schmidt said it recalled for him the furor that greeted the first Bibles ever to come off printing presses: "Bureaucrats and Dominican monks fear anything they can't control," he said. "So they try to destroy it."