Good day, CharterFolk.
Today we are pleased to present a Contributor Column from John Sun, President and CEO of Blueprint.
We provide a bio for John below.
John Sun has served as the President and CEO of Blueprint, a nonprofit that partners with charter schools to provide affordable facilities solutions, since 2014. He has led Blueprint’s expansion across California, Colorado, Texas, and Washington. Prior to joining Blueprint, then known as PCSD (Pacific Charter School Development), he worked with LAUSD on facilities solutions for charter schools and held leadership roles at Green Dot Public Schools. Earlier in his career, he worked in community redevelopment and as a consultant with PwC.
He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Master of Public Policy from the University of Southern California. A South Texas native, he enjoys spending his free time with his three sons.
Focus on the School First. The Facility Will Follow.
My parents came to the United States from Taiwan with not much more than determination and a desire to work. They settled in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas and did what so many immigrant families do: built something from nothing. In their case, that meant restaurants — long hours, early mornings, the whole family pitching in. I attended public schools in the Valley that were underfunded and overcrowded. For most families, a college education was not the aspiration.
Eventually, my family moved to Southern California, and I enrolled at Palos Verdes Peninsula High School. It was like stepping into a different country. The resources were there. The expectations were there. The assumption — stated plainly, built into the culture — was that students would go to college. Not might. Would.
That contrast never left me. It became the lens through which I understood everything that came after — my studies in History at UC Berkeley and Public Policy at USC, my management consulting work, my weekends volunteering in Asian immigrant communities in Los Angeles, and eventually my career.
After working as a management consultant, I was looking for a job where I could apply the skills I learned to make a difference in the community. Then a friend called from Green Dot Public Schools and offered me a job helping them find facilities for new schools across Los Angeles.
That call changed everything.
Working alongside LAUSD and helping Green Dot expand from two schools to nineteen, I saw up close what was holding good schools back. It wasn’t a shortage of talented leaders or committed families. It was real estate challenges. This belief was furthered by my time working in LAUSD’s Facilities Division, where I advised the Superintendent and the Board of Education on building partnerships with charter schools and delivering permanent solutions using the district’s vast resources. It was eye-opening and instructive on how public resources could be marshalled to house all students regardless of the type of school that they attended.
That’s what eventually led me to Blueprint, where our mission is to dismantle barriers to quality education by closing the facilities gap.
Families Choose Academics and Culture, Not a Building.
Here’s the honest truth I’ve come to after years of doing this work: a facility is not what makes a school great. The academics and culture make the school great.
What families are choosing when they enroll their children in a charter school is not a building. They’re choosing teachers who know them. Leaders who hold high expectations. A school community that makes students and parents feel welcome. If a school delivers on those things, the resources follow. Waitlists develop. The school begins to plan expansion, and philanthropic partners want to help fund growth.
The leaders I most admire in this sector have understood this intuitively. They start where they can — a church basement, a shared campus, a temporary co-location on a district site. They pour their energy into instruction, into culture, into the relationships with families that make a school a community. And then, from that foundation of demonstrated success, they build toward permanence.
This isn’t settling. This is sequencing.
There Is a Blueprint for Achieving Your Vision. Real Estate Should Not Be a Barrier.
In my work with charter school leaders, initial conversations always begin with a focus on that sequencing – what does the path look like and how are we going to get there?
At Blueprint, we operate across three areas: technical expertise, access to affordable capital, and real estate project management. But if I wanted to really explain what we do to a school leader, it’s that we take the anxiety out of the unknown when it comes to facilities.
A charter school leader shouldn’t have to become an expert in zoning regulations, construction timelines, and debt financing. Time and time again, I meet leaders who have spent countless hours driving neighborhoods looking for empty parcels of land, touring buildings with real estate brokers, and meeting with lenders to figure out how to access affordable capital to pay for their dream project. All the while, their time should be better spent building culture, recruiting students, and focusing on the classroom rather than construction.
The conversation with partners always begins with a clear-eyed conversation about affordability. We believe strongly that charter schools — whether they’re brand new or part of an established network — should not begin in 60,000-square-foot buildings. Start smaller. Prove the model. Recruit students. Hit your academic targets. Build the kind of school culture that makes families choose you year after year. That track record is what unlocks charter approvals by the authorizer, the philanthropic support, and the political goodwill to pursue something permanent.
When the Ecosystem Works: Lessons from Colorado
Colorado is worth studying to understand what a functioning charter facilities ecosystem looks like.
In a single year, Blueprint helped get four schools off the ground there. It happened when several elements worked together at once.
- A local partner on the ground – Colorado Schools Fund helps to support quality charter schools that want to grow their reach. They identified facilities as a key barrier to this growth.
- Strong parent demand – There is genuine enthusiasm for more high-quality charter schools from families making intentional choices.
- Philanthropic capital – Partners like The Anschutz Foundation and Gates Family Foundation are investing in approaches that go beyond a one-time grant. By investing in Blueprint Colorado’s revolving loan fund, dollars are leveraged with private capital, fully repaid, and reused to support the multiple charter schools across the state of Colorado.
- Policy environment – Colorado League of Charter Schools successfully advocated for legislation that created a dedicated state funding stream for charter schools for facilities.
- Pipeline of trained leaders – Colorado has a developing pool of programs to identify and train leaders to start and sustain successful charter schools.
The lesson from Colorado is that facilities solutions don’t happen in isolation. They happen when good leadership, good policy, and good local partners are working in the same direction.
Colorado International Language Academy — a K–8 language immersion charter school led by Dr. Barbara Rutter — opened in 2019 and had been leasing space within a church. The school delivered results for families, leading to greater demand. Now Blueprint Colorado’s team is converting a three-story, 38,000-square-foot commercial office building into a permanent campus purpose-built for its students: 33 classrooms, dedicated student support spaces, a multi-purpose room, and a commercial kitchen. Blueprint helped assemble the pieces — site acquisition, financing, and project management — so that the school could stay focused on delivering high-quality instruction. That’s what it looks like when the conditions are right, and a school has the right partners to help it realize its vision.
District-Charter Facility Partnerships: Missed Opportunities
The most obvious solution to the real estate challenge for charter schools is district-charter facility partnerships.
Across the country, declining student enrollment has left school districts with buildings sitting largely empty. In many communities, you have charter schools struggling to find affordable space and districts managing facilities they can no longer fill and maintain. That’s a solvable problem – if the politics allow it.
They don’t always, but when they do, the results are meaningful. Blueprint has supported sixteen district-charter facility partnerships in California alone — in Los Angeles, Santa Ana, and Oakland — creating nearly 10,000 student seats. Oakland is not a community typically seen as welcoming to charter schools, but when the focus is on practical solutions for families, rather than ideological positioning, it’s possible to find common ground.
I’m not naive about the obstacles. Union politics, community dynamics, authorizer relationships — these things are real, and they vary enormously by market. It also requires a dedicated partner like Blueprint who is willing to bring these opposing forces together and focus on solutions for children rather than adults.
But the frame I keep coming back to from my public policy days: empty public buildings are not serving any students, and families in those communities deserve equitable access.
What I Hope Charter Leaders Will Think About.
There is a famous line from the movie Field of Dreams that is often quoted: “If you build it, they will come.” Unfortunately, in the world of charter schools, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Charter school leaders are driven by a passion to advance educational opportunity in underserved communities. While the challenge of a facility is very real, a building and its square footage should not be the focus of school leaders who want to impact a community. Start smaller than your ultimate vision, and grow into it. In the meantime, focus on your students, their achievement, and building a culture where kids thrive and where educators want to work. A school environment that families want to attend is the pathway to success.
The kids in communities like the ones I grew up in deserve quality schools that are built to last, and the charter school sector can continue to provide those opportunities if it has the right Blueprint.