http://vimeo.com/116159650

But Bloomfield and Magrino didn’t spend their time traversing Hershey’s lush campus and endless resources feeling overwhelmed; they spent it taking notes on what design principles could most easily be borrowed in order to improve their nascent, public project.

“I started thinking about this school after getting involved in trying to close the achievement gap,” Bloomfield explained. “What I saw was lots of charters that were doing good work – but there were still all these kids who were falling through the cracks. And a lot of those children were either homeless or in the foster care system.

“That led me to wonder, how might we create a public school that could give those kids the sort of round-the-clock treatment and support they needed to become successful? And that question led us here.”

Magrino, fresh from a tour of the school’s expansive auditorium, agreed. “This hall will probably be the size of our entire school,” she said. “But being here is helping me think about how to maximize the spaces that we will have – and how to make do with less in order to provide our kids with as many opportunities as possible.

“This school has a dance studio; will we have a dance studio? No. But setting up electives like Tap Dancing aren’t expensive. Can we sponsor a band? Probably not. But we can probably afford to establish a choir. We can match the people, and we can match the practices, even if we can’t match the money. It’s thinking about what’s most important, and then figuring out how to make that work on our scale and with our resources. So it doesn’t make me wish for things we don’t have. It makes me think about how we can choose wisely about where we’re putting our resources.”

Monument will open its doors for the first time in August 2015, with an inaugural class of just forty students. Its ability to translate the essence of a model like Hershey, and to make it available to increasing numbers of underserved young people, remains to be seen. But its willingness to try is precisely the sort of bet the charter experiment is designed to incentivize people into making.

So let’s keep guarding against the proliferation of for-profit entities in the charter space, and insisting on financial transparency, and demanding that charters and districts find ways to work collaboratively. And let’s start seeing how well some of our most celebrated models of private education can be transported into our most sacredly held public spaces.

In the end, having some public charter schools with the right amount of private in them might actually be a good thing.