Help for Charters in Race for Space

Efforts are growing to assist charter schools in finding and affording facilities, challenges that remain big obstacles to the sector’s continued expansion.

When Anser Charter School opened in the fall of 1999, it spent several months in a vacant office building before settling into the facility it has called home ever since: a former athletic club in downtown Boise, Idaho.

The classrooms are converted racquetball courts, with 20-foot ceilings and no closets. The school doesn’t have a lunchroom or a gymnasium, and it shares the boxy building with Bronco Elite Gymnastics.

Educating students alongside a gymnastics school poses some unusual challenges, and school administrators are hoping to move to...