WASECA — Like other charter schools, Waseca’s TEAM Academy uses some unconventional teaching methods to educate its students.

Among its trademark techniques: extended after-school hours, character education, student mentoring and college preparation starting as early as kindergarten.

But TEAM Academy has something else going for it. It’s inside Waseca’s Central Intermediate public school building, making it the only charter in the state to share such a relationship. While the charter is an entirely separate entity — with its own state funding, curriculum and school board — it teams up with its public school counterpart in a number of ways.

TEAM Academy’s K-6 students use the same band, choir and library instructors as the public school students down the hall. In the morning and afternoon, TEAM students take the same buses to school. The kids also eat lunch in the same cafeteria and play on the same playground as Central Intermediate students.

“There is a good working relationship,” said Eileen Shimota, TEAM Academy director. “It’s kind of the best of both worlds.”

The Waseca public school system isn’t getting left empty-handed either. TEAM pays for the public school services it utilizes including a percentage of its support staff salaries and a portion of the school utility bill.

Perhaps the biggest incentive Waseca schools has for allowing TEAM to function within its walls is the about $300,000 it receives each year from the academy in state lease aid funding.

During its first year, TEAM opened as a kindergarten and fourth-grade school, the line where the traditional Waseca elementary and intermediate divide. TEAM is in the process of adding two grade levels — first and fifth last year, second and sixth this fall and finally third next year — as kids move on each fall.

The slow implementation is working. TEAM has 122 students this year, with waiting lists for lower levels. To keep classes small, each grade has a cap of 25 students and the school says it won’t staff beyond one full-time teacher for each grade level.

That means that even if the school completely caps out, the traditional public school isn’t losing too many students, Shimota said. Plus, the charter could be doing Waseca schools a favor in the long run.

Currently TEAM nets 17 students from outside the Waseca district. The thought is those students and others who graduate from TEAM will simply filter into the public school system — into classrooms right down the hall — once they graduate.

“They’re mingling (with the traditional public school students) now, so when they move up to seventh grade, they’ll know some of those kids,” Shimota said.

Waseca Interim Supt. John Rokke said the charter school is a good educational option in Waseca. He doesn’t believe it will draw too many students away from Waseca’s Hartley Elementary, which is one of only nine blue ribbon schools in Minnesota (an honor bestowed to schools that perform exceptionally well on federally required No Child Left Behind testing).

“It’s not like (Waseca students) are leaving a bad school to go to a good school,” Rokke said. “It’s a parental choice. They are two good choices.”

The Waseca School Board is slated to vote whether to approve its partnership with the charter this winter. It’s likely the extra funding the district gains from TEAM will convince the board to vote in favor.

Joan Webber, a mother with two sons enrolled at TEAM, hopes the unique relationship will continue. “I realized that TEAM was the place to send my children the first time I visited,” she said. “(Yet) my kids do not feel secluded. They interact with other kids.”