Premier Charter School Development Services
HighMark School Development is a charter school developer that seeks to facilitate the development of modern, efficient, and functional charter school facilities across the nation. Our service offering can help your school whether you are a new start-up or an established school looking to expand your current facility. Click on one of the banners below to read more about our charter school development services.
What will happen if we choose HighMark as our Charter School Developer?
Upon expressing formal interest in making Highmark your charter school developer, Highmark will begin collecting some preliminary information from you, including your school charter and charter agreement with your school’s authorizer, in addition to historical and/or projected enrollment figures and financials (preferably a 5-year prospectus).
After reviewing this information, the HighMark team will begin working closely with your school’s board and administration to develop a facilities plan. The plan will both allow your school to grow to your projected enrollment goals as well as keep you within your budget. We never set our schools up for financial failure. We pay strict attention to developing a facilities plan that will allow you to both stay within your budget and to build a significant fund balance each year. (Just as a quick reference, HighMark schools rarely if ever have an annual facilities payment that exceeds 20% of the school’s total annual revenue. Ideally a school’s debt service will be well below 20% of revenue.)
Before construction begins, the school enters into a long-term lease with HighMark School Development, in which HighMark and Educational Capital Solutions become joint lessors of the facility to be built, while the school becomes the lessee. At negotiated points throughout the life of the lease, the school is given purchase options, at which times the school is contractually permitted to purchase the building and become its sole owner, taking HighMark and ECS out of the deal.
The schools we work with have found this deal structure to benefit them greatly and allowed them to get into a charter school facility of their own much earlier than they otherwise might have. The lease portion of the transaction allows the school to build their credit and credibility in addition to their fund balance, in order equip the charter school with what is necessary to acquire conventional financing and to become the owners of their own charter school facility.
Read more about the first phase of the charter school development process, School Outreach.
