The Portland based facilities will include these ordinary neighborhood houses, interconnected by VPN and in other ways, using Free Geek (or other) equipment. Most homes will have gardens, as those feed into our curriculum, which features televised cooking shows (could be on YouTube).
Teacher training is the name of the game these days. PPS is sticking to "analog math" as the monopoly controller, calculators mandatory, for high schoolers next year, except in the pilots, where we use computers and control with FOSS ("digital math"). Either way, you learn a lot of math, so it's more a matter of longer term career planning, selecting intelligently, a family decision.
As I explained to the Math Forum, all public schools are charter schools, i.e. have a charter. It's just a matter of when they got it (100 years ago?) and what stipulations are built in. The new ones are defined using software i.e. have executable components, as we're finding a better way to execute "the law" is to make "the law" runnable (or call them "business rules" if you're old skool).
My own house is on the map as one of the sysadmins. I'm not expecting to house students here, but do have plans for the garden, working in cahoots with a teacher. Parent meetings happen informally. Work with translators is under way. Probably next on the agenda is to find some counterpart houses in the Philippines and/or Japan and/or Korea, as we're planning for rotation among students and faculty alike, copying the military in that respect.
Our classroom facilities need not be in homes. We may paint up some vans, build a fleet, but in any case the engineers have their corporate environments already equipped with the math labs we need, plus have a lot of "the right stuff" in some cases i.e. some are planning to join our faculty at some level. I'm hoping we plan around the Max quite a bit as public transportation is just what the doctor ordered. Vans could do station runs for the outliers, don't have to run door to door in most cases.
Good getting that report from Vern and Jeff from NECC, where they gave PSF an official footprint. Steve and I both had favorable comments, are looking forward to Pycon in Atlanta. EuroPython is apparently being a blast, for those lucky enough to attend, others tracking remotely. Meeting in Greater Seattle today, time to study those Google Maps.
