Our model is actually exported from a school in Minnesota that is running very similarly. It would be easy to export each program individually but the school as a whole would be more complex. We have a huge facility paid for by bonds that allows us to do what we do. Because our school district is crumbling, we have many students who are not interested in our particular programs but want to come because it's a safe school with a decent education. It's a hard sell when you have an 8th grade boy who has to take ballet... but it happens to us every year.
If I'm understanding what you're saying, part of the difficulty of exporting your program would be that it would require a substantial investment in new or dramatically renovated buildings in order to run in other schools. Is that accurate? Are you arts/production focused?
If I can ask another question: how do kids get to your school? Do parents have to do anything different in order to get kids there compared to what they would do to get their kids to the default school? In a lot of places I think that kids end up with uneven access due to issues like transportation, which is only within the capability of families where only one parent works, where the student is lucky enough to be in the neighborhood, or where the parent works in the neighborhood of the school; but it is out of reach for other families.
I'm all for (public) charters if access is truly equal and if they are not used as a way to slam other public schools that are not granted the same conditions (excluding kids with EBD, for instance) and which--unlike charters--often serve a portion of the population that is uninvested in being in school in the first place. Your observation that you lose few students because they want to be there is one of the embedded conditions that regular public schools can't match, and it is one that has a significant impact when it comes to looking at test scores and weighing a school's success or lack thereof.
You mentioned donations at one point in your post. Would you say that donations either in start up expenses, or on a yearly basis, are significant to allowing your program to operate as it does?
Thanks for all of your detailed responses--I am genuinely interested in how different schools are operating. Too bad you and Dottie and I are so geographically spread out--I imagine that we could happily sit together in a coffee shop discussing this for hours
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