The State of Ceara in Northeastern Brazil, as many other poor regions in the world, has a serious problem of low-level academic and pedagogic formal education of a large portion of its board of teachers. This causes a direct impact on the quality of education that the students receive. Considering that the overall socioeconomic condition of the region may take decades to improve, it is very unlikely that, in the short run, the students will be taught by well-prepared teachers, using up to date teaching methodologies. The low cost and ease of use of semi-immersive virtual reality environments have recently caused this technology to experience a very rapid expansion all over the world. More and more people have been devising applications for this type of virtual reality technology, which has become even more attractive because of the ease of integration of virtual worlds and users over the Internet. In this work, we present a low cost distributed virtual reality system for the education of students from grades K to 12, which relies on the Ceara state telecommunication network. The proposed system is based on an architecture that allows efficient data distribution in low bandwidth networks. Since Brazil, such as many other countries, does not have the capacity to form enough teachers to attend the educational needs of the growing population of children, the education problem will tend to be seriously aggravated over the coming years. We believe that virtual schools, based on the proposed virtual reality system, where remote teachers and students can exchange ideas and propose activities may be an important part of the solution to this problem.