charterschool.network · School-choice enrollment, run in the open · Early access · 2026
Charter schools are a distinct kind of school: admission by lottery, governance by an independent board in open meetings, a public role to account for. This platform leads with the one thing families and boards most need to trust — a SHA-256 verifiable enrollment lottery you can re-run offline from the published record, with committed priority tiers and no student name in the public record. Plus online enrollment, a free student-records tier, and board governance in the open. It is a for-profit platform FOR charter schools — not a charter school itself. Money is honest-off; a conversation is the honest next step.
How it works
Every step is described as it is built today, with the honest-off holds called out where they exist.
Step 1 · Set up the school — recognised as a charter, records tier free
The platform recognises a charter as a first-class organisation kind, which sets a default entitlement and stands up the school’s vertical — and charges nothing to do it. The student-records tier settles no money. From day one the school’s enrollment and student data is school-owned, under the school’s own brand and contact, not the platform’s.
Step 2 · Run open enrollment and the verifiable lottery
Open enrollment collects applications. If seats are oversubscribed, the board publishes the rules and the priority tiers, the operator commits a hashed seed before entries close, and at the draw the seed is revealed and the result is anchored on the SHA-256 ledger. Every seated and waitlisted family is assigned an opaque token, and the school can share the published record so a family can re-run the draw offline to confirm their own placement. No student name ever enters the public record.
Step 3 · Enroll seated students and run the school
A granted seat binds into enrollment: the student is registered and finalized onto the roster. From there the records daily-driver carries the gradebook and GPA rollup, printable transcripts and report cards, immunization-compliance tracking, per-meeting attendance, and IDEA special-education deadline and service-minute tracking. Records settle no money; the tier is free.
Step 4 · Govern in the open — and keep the records the accountability conversation runs on
The board runs its policy manual and its meetings on the platform: agenda, minutes, motions, and named roll-call votes, with a per-requirement staff-acknowledgment ledger. A public sunshine-law portal is built to read the adopted record. The attendance and ADA/membership math is computed and ready for the accountability conversation — but the state / authorizer submission channel, and the public portal’s minutes-adoption finalizer, are honest-off and held. We provide the mechanism; a human still signs the record.
What is built
Every capability is labelled honestly: Built means the underlying engine exists and is production-ready. Where a finalizer or a submission channel is held, the label says so — and money is honest-off across all of it today.
When applications exceed seats, a charter admits by lottery — and the draw itself should be checkable, not just promised. The draw commits a hash of its seed and its rules BEFORE entries close, reveals the seed only at the draw, and anchors the commitment and the result on a SHA-256, hash-chained tamper-evident ledger. From the published seed, rules, and result, a family, a board member, or a journalist re-runs the draw OFFLINE — no phone-home to us, no account, no black box — and confirms three things byte-for-byte: the seed was not swapped after entries closed, the published rules (the tier DEFINITIONS and the seat counts) were not changed, and the result was not reordered. Today the school shares the published record directly (for example as an export) so that check can be run; a public, self-serve endpoint to fetch the record straight from this platform is in active development. Priority tiers (a continuing sibling, an attendance-zone preference, a set-aside) are committed rule DEFINITIONS applied BEFORE any randomness, so changing which tiers exist or how they rank breaks the commitment. Honest scope: cryptographically binding the entrant ROSTER and each entrant’s weight and claimed tier — so the WHO is provably frozen too, not only the seed, the rules, and the ordering — is in active development and is not yet a claim we make. We provide the provable draw mechanism; the school and its board own the roster and the policy. The lottery engine, the commit-reveal draw, and the offline verifier are built and wired. Live money is honest-off — this is enrollment, not a purchase.
Built & wired · offline-verifiable
The public verifiable record carries OPAQUE entrant ids and the proof — never a name, never a date of birth. The applicant-to-token binding is consent-gated at a single fail-closed chokepoint: an applicant with no recorded directory-information grant, or one under a publication kill-switch, is withheld from the public draw entirely rather than published in redacted form. A family verifies their own token’s position without anyone else’s identity being exposed. The consent gate calls the platform’s one canonical suppression rule — there is no second, copy-pasted copy of the policy to drift. The gate and the opaque-token draw are built and wired. This is the structural difference from a ‘trust our black box’ lottery.
Built & wired · consent fail-closed
Register a student, finalize them onto the roster, and withdraw or transfer — with a consent chokepoint at intake. Seated students flow into a records daily-driver: roster, a gradebook with GPA rollup, printable transcripts and report cards, and immunization-compliance tracking. The student-records tier settles no money — records are the free tier. Honest scope: this is an enrollment-and-records daily-driver that COMPLEMENTS a school’s system of record; it is not a certified, full academic system-of-record, and its roster export is not an IMS-certified integration. The enrollment, gradebook, transcript, and immunization engines are built. No live billing, no subscription.
Built · records tier free
An independent charter board runs its policy manual (draft → active — retired, an immutable version sequence, and a per-requirement staff-acknowledgment ledger), and its meetings (agenda, minutes, motions, and NAMED, on-the-record roll-call votes recorded into the minutes for open-meeting / sunshine-law transparency). A public sunshine-law portal is built to read the adopted record with no login. Honest-off hold: the public-portal minutes-ADOPTION finalizer and the cryptographic e-sign seal are not yet provisioned, so the public portal returns an empty record until that human step is wired — the governance engine and its routes are built and registered; the public-adoption finalizer is honest-off. Nothing here is legal advice.
Built · public-adoption finalizer honest-off
Attendance is recorded per class meeting, and the engine computes the state-reportable rollup: a present/absent count, an average-daily-attendance ratio (null on a zero denominator — never a fabricated 0/0), and a distinct-student membership headcount. That is the arithmetic behind the numbers a charter’s public role runs on. What is HONEST-OFF: the state / authorizer SUBMISSION channel. The export path stages and validates an extract but submits NOTHING — per-state maps are held for a signed channel and per-state counsel. We do not file ADA to the state, do not calculate per-pupil apportionment or funding, and do not produce a named authorizer report. The attendance and ADA/membership math is built; the submission channel is held.
Built math · state submission honest-off
A charter serves every student it seats, special education included. The special-education compliance engine tracks IDEA deadlines and logs service-minute delivery against what a plan requires, surfacing where a due date or a minutes obligation is at risk. It is a deterministic compliance-ops substrate: it tracks and flags; it does not author a plan, render legal advice, or decide a service. The IDEA deadline-and-service-minute engine is built. Student plan data is minor PII — consent-gated, school-owned, and never made public.
Built · compliance-ops
For charter schools
An oversubscribed lottery is the moment a charter’s fairness is most questioned — and the moment it is hardest to prove. The verifiable draw turns that into physics: a committed seed, committed priority tiers, an anchored result, and an offline verifier a parent or a board member runs themselves. You publish the rules and own the policy; the platform proves the draw honoured them.
Online enrollment, roster, gradebook, transcripts, report cards, immunization compliance, per-meeting attendance, and IDEA special-education tracking — the student-records tier settles no money. It complements your system of record rather than claiming to replace it: honest about being an enrollment-and-records daily-driver, not a certified academic system-of-record.
A board policy manual with an immutable version sequence and a staff-acknowledgment ledger, plus meetings with agenda, minutes, motions, and named roll-call votes for sunshine-law transparency. The public sunshine portal is built; its minutes-adoption finalizer is honest-off and held for the human step that signs a record final. The attendance and ADA/membership math is computed — the state / authorizer submission channel is honest-off.
To book a conversation: [email protected].
What is built and what is honest-off — plainly
Built and wired today: the verifiable enrollment lottery (SHA-256 commit-reveal, committed priority tiers, an anchored result, and an offline verifier with no phone-home); the consent-gated opaque-token draw (no student name in the public record, fail-closed); online enrollment and the free student-records tier (roster, gradebook and GPA rollup, transcripts and report cards, immunization compliance); board governance (policy manual, meeting agenda/minutes/motions, named roll-call votes, a staff-acknowledgment ledger, and a public sunshine-law portal); attendance and ADA/membership math; and IDEA special-education deadline and service-minute tracking.
Honest-off — present but not enabled for live use: all money (no live billing, no subscription, no live payment); the state / authorizer ADA-and-membership SUBMISSION channel (the export stages and submits nothing, held for a signed channel and per-state counsel); and the public board portal’s minutes-adoption finalizer plus the cryptographic e-sign seal. We do NOT calculate per-pupil apportionment or funding, and we do NOT produce a named authorizer report or renewal packet — that code does not exist, so we do not claim it. No school has run a live enrollment lottery on charterschool.network yet. A conversation is the honest next step. Nothing here is legal advice.
The platform underneath
charterschool.network is the charter-school front door on a broader school platform. The same platform runs enrollment, student records, communications, and governance for schools of every kind; homeroom.software is the publishing platform it is built on. charterschool.network is a for-profit product — a software vendor serving charter schools, not a charter school, nonprofit, or authorizer itself.
Early access · Charter leaders, boards, and families · Be the first school to run a verifiable lottery here
charterschool.network is in active development. No school has run a live enrollment lottery on charterschool.network yet. We do conversations that show the current state honestly: how the commit-reveal lottery and the offline verifier work, how priority tiers are committed before the draw, how online enrollment and the free records tier flow, how a board runs its policy manual and open meetings, and exactly what is built versus honest-off. There is no pricing commitment and no signup. If it looks right for your school, we discuss what early access looks like.
To book: email [email protected].
FAQ
No. charterschool.network is a for-profit software company — a vendor whose product is this platform for charter schools. It is not a charter school, not a nonprofit, and not a charter authorizer. Charter schools are public schools; the software that serves them is a for-profit product. We are precise about the difference because it matters: nothing we run is a public entity, and this site sells software, not donations.
Before entries close, the draw publishes a SHA-256 hash commitment of its seed and its rules — the operator binds itself to a seed it cannot later swap. At the draw, the seed is revealed and the result is anchored on a hash-chained, tamper-evident ledger. Anyone holding the published record can re-run the deterministic draw OFFLINE — with no call back to us and no database — and confirm the ordering byte-for-byte against that seed and those rules. A swapped seed, a changed rule DEFINITION (a tier or a seat count), or a reordered result all fail the check. What that proves is the DRAW mechanics — not yet the roster: cryptographically binding WHICH entrants were in the pool, and each one’s weight and claimed tier, is in active development, so we do not yet claim the WHO is provably frozen. What IS committed is provable, not merely promised.
Yes. Priority tiers (for example a continuing sibling, an in-zone preference, or a free/reduced-lunch set-aside) are expressed as COMMITTED rule definitions with an explicit ranking, applied BEFORE any randomness. Randomness only orders applicants WITHIN a tier, never across tiers. Because the full tier LIST — which tiers exist, how they rank, and the seat counts — rides into the committed rules digest, changing a tier DEFINITION after the commitment breaks it and the verifier catches it. One honest limit: binding WHICH tier a given applicant was placed in — an individual’s CLAIMED tier — is not yet part of that digest; cryptographically freezing the per-entrant roster, weights, and tier assignments is in active development. We provide the provable tier-rule mechanism; the school and its board own the policy of which tiers apply and how each applicant is classified.
No. The public verifiable record carries OPAQUE entrant ids and the proof only — never a name or date of birth. The applicant-to-token binding is consent-gated at a single fail-closed chokepoint: an applicant with no recorded directory-information grant, or one under a publication kill-switch, is withheld from the public draw entirely. A family verifies their own token’s placement without anyone else’s identity being disclosed.
The student-records tier settles no money — enrollment, roster, gradebook, transcripts, and immunization records are the free tier. There is no live billing here, no subscription, and no live payment: money is honest-off across the platform today. If a school later turns on a fee-bearing module, that is a separate, opt-in decision — the records daily-driver itself is free to run.
Be clear-eyed: this is an enrollment-and-records daily-driver that COMPLEMENTS a school’s system of record. It carries enrollment, roster, gradebook, transcripts, report cards, immunization compliance, and attendance — but it is not a certified, full academic system-of-record, and its OneRoster-shaped roster export is not an IMS/1EdTech-certified integration. We say so plainly rather than imply a certification we do not hold.
The governance engine is built and its routes are registered: a board policy manual with an immutable version sequence and a staff-acknowledgment ledger, plus meetings with agenda, minutes, motions, and NAMED roll-call votes for open-meeting / sunshine-law transparency. A public portal is built to read the adopted record without a login. Honest-off today: the public portal’s minutes-ADOPTION finalizer and the cryptographic e-sign seal are not yet provisioned, so the public portal returns an empty record until that human step is wired. Nothing here is legal advice.
No — and we will not pretend otherwise. Attendance is recorded per class meeting and the engine computes the average-daily-attendance ratio and the membership headcount honestly (a null ratio on a zero denominator, never a fabricated number). But the state / authorizer SUBMISSION channel is honest-off: the export path stages and validates an extract and submits nothing, because the per-state maps are held for a signed channel and per-state counsel. We do not calculate per-pupil apportionment or funding, and we do not produce a named authorizer report or a renewal packet. That code does not exist, so we do not claim it.
A charter serves every student it seats, and special education is part of that. The IDEA compliance-ops engine tracks deadlines and logs service-minute delivery against what a plan requires, flagging where a due date or a minutes obligation is at risk. It is a tracking-and-flagging substrate — it does not author a plan, decide a service, or render legal advice. Student plan data is minor PII: consent-gated, school-owned, and never made public.
Student and family enrollment and records data is owned by the school and is never sold to or shared with outside companies, advertisers, or third parties. Data involving minor students is consent-gated — a family opts in before any disclosure — and consent can be withdrawn at any time. Minor student data runs on our own private systems and is never made public; the public lottery record carries opaque tokens only.
By a conversation, not a signup. charterschool.network is in active development, and no school has run a live enrollment lottery on it yet. A conversation shows the current state honestly: how the commit-reveal lottery and the offline verifier work, how priority tiers are committed, how online enrollment and the free records tier flow, and exactly what is built versus honest-off. There is no pricing commitment and no signup. Email [email protected].