“The schedule, the buses, the insurance — the logistics will kill it first.”

The schedule. The master schedule is the real policy document — it says what a school actually values. Working patterns exist at every intensity: block structures, half-day cohorts (Michigan's shared-time centers run on them), alternating academic/technical weeks (Southeastern Regional's model), and advisory-embedded time. The Plug-In Start exists precisely so the schedule conversation doesn't kill year one: roughly an hour a week fits inside almost any schedule while the district learns what it wants to commit to.

The buses. Transportation is a real cost and also a pedagogical question. Region 10's hard-won lesson — "integrate, don't shuttle" — is that the half-day shuttle fractures the student experience. Weigh transportation spend against the alternatives: bringing the work in-house, bringing academics to the career site, or clustering placements so travel happens once, not daily.

The liability. Mostly solvable, occasionally a hard wall — and the wall is field-specific. Healthcare is the sharpest case: minor-age rules restrict clinical exposure, so strong programs design around the wall — front-loading certifiable content (anatomy, terminology, CPR, safety credentials) so students hit clinical placements at 17+ fully documented, and treating compliance as curriculum rather than paperwork. Workers' compensation, insurance riders, and child-labor rules vary by state and field; our research catalogs the architecture, and your carrier and counsel should see the design early, not at launch.