Thirteen years ago, the J.A. and Katherine Albertson Foundation had spent a lot of money trying to help launch charter schools in Idaho, and most of them had failed. The strategy of writing $250,000 checks to well-intentioned groups and hoping a school would emerge wasn’t working. So the foundation made a different decision: find the right expert, give them a year to figure out the landscape, and build something more durable.

They found Terry Ryan, recruited him from Ohio where he had spent a decade in education policy and school reform work, and gave him a mandate that was more aspiration than blueprint: 20,000 new seats in 10 years. On the latest Ever Onward Podcast, Ryan joined host Tommy Ahlquist and co-host Roger Quarrels, the Albertson Foundation’s executive director, to talk about how that vision became reality, what Idaho’s charter school sector actually looks like today, and what the model has to teach the rest of the country.

Starting With What Didn’t Work

Ryan arrived in Idaho in 2013 with a clear-eyed understanding of how charter school sectors get built and a healthy dose of humility about what he didn’t know yet. His first move was to spend a year listening rather than acting, mapping who was already doing good work and understanding why so many previous efforts had failed.

The initial instinct was to recruit proven national models, organizations like KIPP with established track records and replicable systems. That didn’t work. Idaho’s per-pupil funding is among the lowest in the country, and national organizations running their numbers simply couldn’t make the economics work. If the established chains wouldn’t come, Idaho would have to develop its own talent.

That shift turned out to be the right one. What emerged from it was Bluum, B-L-U-U-M, Idaho’s nonprofit incubator for high-performing public charter schools, built around a fellowship model that identifies promising school leaders, trains them rigorously, and provides the financial and operational infrastructure to help them open and sustain schools.

Forty-two fellows later, the results are hard to argue with: 48 schools opened or expanded, more than 20,000 students served, and a sector diverse enough to include everything from classical academies to career and technical education schools to innovative online-hybrid models. Idaho has gone from a state where charter schools struggled to get off the ground to one that other states study as a model.

The Fellowship Model: Talent First, Everything Else Second

The core insight driving Bluum’s approach is that school quality is fundamentally a leadership question. Find the right person, develop them properly, give them the support they need, and the school tends to work. Skip any of those steps and it doesn’t matter how well-intentioned the mission is.

The fellowship process starts with a wide net. When Bluum launched its first cohort, 35 applicants came in from 13 states, including sitting superintendents who wanted to try something different. The selection process winnows that pool down to the people most likely to succeed not just as educators, but as the operators of what are essentially small businesses: managing budgets, hiring and developing staff, building community relationships, and sustaining enrollment over time.

Fellows spend a year learning the full scope of what it takes to open and run a school. They work with Bluum’s finance team to understand the economics, with national partners like Building Hope on facility financing, and with existing schools in the network to see what good execution actually looks like in practice. By the time a fellow is ready to open, they’ve had a year of structured preparation that most school founders never get.

A Sector Built on Diversity, Not Uniformity

One of the most distinctive features of Idaho’s charter landscape, and one of the things Ryan credits with its success, is that it doesn’t look like a single replicable model. Bluum describes itself as model-agnostic: what matters is results and financial sustainability, not adherence to a particular pedagogical philosophy.

The sector that’s emerged reflects that. American Classical Schools of Idaho, led by a retired Air Force colonel, offers a rigorous classical curriculum where students study Latin and wear uniforms. Elevate Academies, born out of Caldwell and now operating in multiple locations across the state, serves students who weren’t on track to graduate through an intensive career and technical education model, complete with employer signing days that mirror college signing day ceremonies. Gem Prep started as an online school and has evolved into a network of brick-and-mortar campuses that also runs “learning societies,” small satellite learning environments of around 20 students that can operate in a rural VFW basement or serve student athletes who travel too frequently for a traditional schedule.

The Elevate story is worth dwelling on. Founders Monica and Matt, former Caldwell educators whom Quarrels encouraged to apply for a Bluum fellowship after years of frustration inside a traditional district, built their school specifically for students the system had already written off. They knocked door-to-door in the toughest neighborhoods of Caldwell and said, come to our school. Their graduates don’t just walk across a stage; they have jobs waiting for them, with employers standing behind them at a signing ceremony. Elevate now has campuses in Caldwell, Nampa, Post Falls, and Idaho Falls, with Twin Falls coming next.

The Rural Problem and the Long Game

Not all of Bluum’s work happens in urban or suburban settings. Some of its most meaningful, and most fragile, work has been in rural Idaho, where communities are watching their schools disappear as enrollment shrinks and districts decide consolidation makes more financial sense than keeping a building open.

Hollister, a tiny community on Highway 95 south of Twin Falls, is one example. When the Filer School District moved to close Hollister’s school, a woman named Julie Coyle, a former school board chair with no traditional education credentials, came to Bluum and said she wanted to save it. She became a fellow, was trained up, and opened the Hollister Charter School. It now serves 65 students in a community that would otherwise have lost its school entirely.

Ryan is honest about the fragility of these rural schools. They’re often personality-driven, built around a single exceptional leader, and it’s genuinely unclear how sustainable they are without that person. But his perspective on that is characteristically practical: if the work keeps a school alive for six or ten years that otherwise would have closed, that matters, even if the 30-year picture is uncertain.

Financing the Model

None of this works without money, and one of Bluum’s most significant accomplishments has been building a financing infrastructure that makes new charter schools viable in a low per-pupil funding environment.

Ryan wrote and won a federal Charter Schools Program grant in 2018 after a failed attempt the previous year taught him what the application needed to include. That grant came in at $22 million. A subsequent grant added $30 million more. He’s heading back to the Department of Education to request another $16 million. Combined with foundation support from Albertson, land donations from private developers, materials donations from local businesses, and access to the state’s credit rating for facility refinancing, the ecosystem Bluum has assembled around school financing is one of its most important, and least visible, contributions to the sector.

The basic structure: Albertson funds the fellowship, federal grants and foundation dollars provide startup capital, and a combination of private and nonprofit banking partners handle facility financing. After five years, schools that have hit their enrollment targets do a takeout refinancing at better rates, often using the state’s credit rating, freeing up capital and putting them on a sustainable long-term footing. It has worked, without exception, across every school in the network.

Thirteen years in, Idaho has something it didn’t have before: a proven, replicable system for launching high-quality schools that fit the specific needs of specific communities, from downtown Boise to rural Hollister. The Albertson Foundation’s long-term commitment is, by Ryan’s own account, the essential ingredient. “You need an anchor organization that’s truly committed to it for the longer haul,” he said. “So often people think you can do it in a couple of years. No.”

The results suggest he’s right. And so does the fact that other states keep calling to ask how Idaho did it.

Learn more about Bluum and Idaho’s charter school sector at bluum.org. Learn more about Elevate Academies at elevate208.org, Gem Prep at gemprep.org, and American Classical Schools of Idaho at ACSI.org.