New School Development: A Toolkit for Charter Support Organizations and Charter School Founders

Resource Selection
10 Apr, 2018

The National Charter School Resource Center (NCSRC) released a new toolkit to help Charter Support Organizations (CSOs) and charter school founders find key resources on opening a new charter school. The number of new charter schools opening each year is down in many states. Founding groups report a variety of challenges that make it more difficult to open new schools, including securing affordable and appropriate facilities and estimating enrollment or recruiting students, among many others.

In response to these challenges, the NCSRC has designed a navigational toolkit that provides a wide array of publicly available New School Design (NSD) resources from across the country. These NSD resources focus primarily on supporting founding groups during the planning and start-up phases of a charter school’s life cycle. Founding groups can use this toolkit to research CSO NSD services, find advice from charter school founders, and explore NSD resources to strengthen their understanding of what it takes to open a new charter school. This toolkit was developed with four main sources of data: (1) interviews with experts at state-wide CSOs that support NSD, (2) questionnaire responses from charter school founders, (3) reports from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, and (4) research on NSD resources

You can download the Excel spreadsheet referenced in the toolkit here.

Additional Resources