Executive decision support for independent charter schools
Your hardest callsare never just one question
A grade-level expansion is a strategy question, a finance question, an academic question, and an enrollment question at once. Independent charters and small networks answer all four without a district-sized central office behind them.
Alta Council is your executive cabinet, on demand. Bring the issue; it names the decision inside it and works out which perspectives that decision needs.
Bring one real, non-confidential issue — no student records. Twenty minutes, and no account required. Your advisors are AI.
Question you’re chairing
ExampleOur enrollment is 12% below budget, math proficiency is declining, and the board wants to add a new program next year. What should we do?
A K-8 charter school in Ohio with 540 students, about two months of cash, and renewal review starting next spring.
Executive Strategy
What does this displace?
Tell the board there will be no new program for 2027-28, and redirect that energy into middle-grades math and retention, because those are the two numbers your renewal review opens on next spring.
Finance & Sustainability
What does it really cost?
Decline the new program for 2027-28, but understand that your urgent decision is rebalancing the current 2026-27 budget within the next thirty days, because a 12 percent shortfall is a hole in the year already underway.
Academic Quality
Who is it actually for?
Agree with both seats that the new program stops; the academic decision you must make this month is naming one owner of K-8 mathematics, with protected weekly time, and guaranteeing a daily intervention block survives whatever staffing cuts Finance forces.
Enrollment, Engagement & Family Experience
Will families come, and stay?
Your 12 percent is not final — Ohio counts students through the year, so a 45-day backfill campaign in K-5 can still recover revenue that Finance is about to cut positions to cover.
Each advisor’s opening line. Full counsel runs about 250 words a seat.
They disagreed. She still had to decide.
Finance moved to cut positions inside thirty days. Enrollment argued the shortfall was not final, and a backfill campaign could recover the revenue Finance was cutting against. Neither was wrong from where it sat. Alta puts the split on the record rather than smoothing it away.
The chair heard both, pushed back, and closed. This is what she kept.
Read the complete sessionDecision record
No new program for 2027-28. Rebalance this year's budget within thirty days and put the capacity into middle-grades math.
- Because
- Enrollment and math are the two numbers renewal opens on next spring, and the shortfall is in the year already underway.
- Not doing
- Cutting positions before the backfill campaign runs, and adding the program the board asked for.
- Next step
- Name one owner of K-8 mathematics, with protected weekly time, before the budget is rebalanced.
Better counsel before you commit
A decision this size usually gets made one of four ways.
- On your own
- Fastest, and the one where a blind spot survives to the end. Alta argues the other side before you commit.
- With your leadership team
- They know the school better than any outsider can. Alta adds a structured challenge from outside the room, not instead of it.
- With outside experts
- Right for deep, specialist work. Alta is available on the Tuesday the decision is in front of you, across every domain the decision touches at once.
The fourth is a general assistant
You can take any of this to ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, and for plenty of work you should — Alta Council is built on one of them. The difference is who does the work around the model.
At a general assistant
- You assign the roles
- You supply your school context again
- You ask for the counterargument
- You reconcile answers that disagree
- You write down where you landed
At Alta Council
- The chief of staff routes the issue
- Your school context persists between sessions
- Each advisor is obliged to its own remit
- Advisors answer one another on the record
- Alta drafts the decision record
The intelligence is there. The structure is your job, every time.
How a session runs
Step 01
Bring the issue
One or two sentences, in your own words. Say what the session is for — make a decision, explore options, build a plan, review a decision, brief me — and it runs accordingly.
Step 02
Alta finds the decision inside it
Issues arrive tangled. Your chief of staff names the decision this session should take first, and says plainly what your own framing is taking as fixed.
Step 03
The options get wider
Before anyone evaluates the course you named, Alta puts the real alternatives on the table — the staged version, the reversible test, the one that changes the constraint. Yours is always among them.
Step 04
The council deliberates
Only the seats the decision actually reaches. They read one another, argue by name, and disagree on the record. Push on the soft parts.
Step 05
You decide, and keep the record
The call, the reasons, what you're not doing, and the assumption it rests on. Months later, when someone asks why, the whole deliberation is still there.
The orchestration layer
You should not have to know which advisor to ask.
That is the chief of staff’s job. It names the decision inside your issue, widens the options before anyone evaluates them, decides which seats the decision genuinely touches and in what depth, brings in a specialist when the decision reaches one, runs a board-and-charter check on every issue, and pulls in the context that bears on it: your school profile, what you decided before, the authorizer requirements in play. You stay the executive rather than the prompt engineer.
The core seats
Executive Strategy
Mission, priorities, positioning, and hard tradeoffs.
Finance & Sustainability
Budgets, cash flow, funding streams, and the cost of every choice.
Academic Quality
Instruction, curriculum, assessment, and student outcomes.
Enrollment, Engagement & Family Experience
Demand, retention, attendance, engagement, and what families experience.
Plus a governance review on every decision — whose call it is, and what it does to your charter and renewal — and Student Services or People & Execution when the decision reaches them.
Built from inside charter school leadership
Alta Council was created by Martez Hill, a sitting charter school superintendent who carries the same tradeoffs every day. It is a founder-led product, not a platform designed for schools from the outside.
About Martez and Alta CouncilBefore you type anything in
- No student records — do not enter them
- Sessions are visible only to your school
- Every vendor that receives data is named
- Anthropic states it does not train on API data
Bring one issue to the table
Bring one real, non-confidential issue you are facing now, and watch the council take it up. Twenty minutes.