Public Boarding School Seeking to Expand

SEED School’s founders tout record of sending students on to college.

The founders of the nation’s only public boarding school are pushing efforts in several states to replicate their program, which takes poor students out of unstable homes and puts them in a rigorous, round-the-clock college-preparatory setting.

The SEED Foundation, a nonprofit organization that opened the 320-student School for Educational Evolution and Development, or SEED School, in the District of Columbia eight years ago, wants to open a second school in Maryland.

To that end, SEED officials are seeking approval from Maryland lawmakers and Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., a Republican, to create a state-financed boarding school that their group would run. The foundation would raise millions of dollars in private money to build the school, but is asking the state legislature to support its annual operations, which would cost $32,000...