Say you live in a city where just about every restaurant is a McDonald's. Everybody pays taxes to support the McDonald's restaurant chain, and everybody can eat at McDonald's for free. You can go to one of the few private restaurants in town and pay extra for a different kind of meal -- but you still have to pay taxes to support McDonald's.

A few of the McDonald's in town are excellent. Some are lousy. Most are mediocre. Everybody agrees they ought to be better. But although the company has begun modest improvements, it hasn't figured out how to make the establishments substantially better across the board.

One of the McDonald's shuts down. Time goes by, and a group of residents wants to re-open and run the joint itself. The members think they can serve better burgers and fries at a lower cost. They've spent extraordinary amounts of time, money, and effort to make their case on paper. Now all they're asking is a chance to prove it. Should the McDonald's corporation let them?

All analogies are inexact, but this one roughly sums up the question surrounding a proposed charter school in Richmond. A group of parents in the South-of-the-James area near Forest Hill Park wants to reopen the old Patrick Henry Elementary building as a K-5 academy. The school would be open to anybody in the city, from Fulton Bottom to Windsor Farms. It would focus on arts, music, and science in an academically rigorous, interdisciplinary program. Parents would have to commit to several hours of service to the school each term. Students would wear uniforms. By the third year of operation, Patrick Henry expects to run at a cost of less than $8,500 per pupil per year, compared to the city's average of more than $12,000. (You can read more at http://www.patrickhenrycharter.org.)

IT COULD BE a failure. Some charter schools have been. But the Patrick Henry School Initiative group has done its prep work and its homework. It has made a serious, professional proposal. Yet the Richmond school administration has been giving it a hard time. A review committee keeps moving the goalposts and requesting more information.

The Patrick Henry group has responded in voluminous detail -- providing reams of supporting documentation about Individualized Instruction Plans, building remediation for ADA compliance, curriculum alignment with the International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme, FERPA compliance, transportation budgeting, and the myriad other regulatory details.

Much of that may be necessary. The city is constrained by state and federal requirements -- and because the Patrick Henry School of Science and Arts would receive public funding, the city has a fiduciary obligation to make sure tax dollars are spent wisely.

On the other hand, regulations also can be used to smother innovation and thwart competition. Consider some of the objections raised by the school review committee headed by Yvonne Brandon, deputy superintendent for instruction and accountability: The "goals and educational objectives" of the charter school "may be overly ambitious." The school requires a "stronger case for the need of academic improvement from the anticipated student population." The pupil assessment process "appears to be ambitious."

Too ambitious? That's a problem? Perhaps only through the eyes of a school system about which the chief complaint for decades has been its marked lack of ambition.

The concerns about compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act seem especially cheeky given the school system's own record on that score: 50 out of 55 schools non-compliant. As for need, one would have thought by now it has been demonstrated to a fare-thee-well. Anyone who remains unconvinced need only drive around Forest Hill Avenue, Semmes Avenue, Broad Rock Boulevard, and their tributaries to see a superfluity of yard signs supporting the Patrick Henry initiative. Citizens of Richmond are sick and tired of eating bad McDonald's.

THAT MIGHT BE precisely why the school administration seems to have raised so many objections to the proposal: It might be worried not that Patrick Henry will fail, but that it will succeed. Then other parts of the city might begin similar initiatives. And then?

The Patrick Henry charter effort could flop. There's always a risk involved when people try to do something different. But continuing the status quo contains an even greater risk: the intolerable probability that nothing will get better.

As a March editorial about the initiative put it: "Not every start-up business makes it, and not every start-up that makes it becomes No. 1 -- or deserves to. But that's no reason not to encourage striving entrepreneurs. The only way to find out is to try."

The School Board might vote on the proposal Monday night; it might defer its decision until May 19. The Board meets at 6 p.m. on the second floor of City Hall. Anyone who would like to see the Patrick Henry School of Science and Arts become a reality -- for that matter, anyone who would like to see Richmond's schools improve -- should show up and encourage the board to vote yes.

My thoughts do not aim for your assent -- just place them alongside your own reflections for a while.

--Robert Nozick.
Contact A. Barton Hinkle at (804) 649-6627 or bhinkle@timesdispatch.com.