The Charter School Office has created the Opening Procedures Handbook as a tool to assist charter school founding groups prepare for the exciting, yet challenging, task of opening a Massachusetts public charter school. The Handbook summarizes the opening procedures process, identifies the action items that must be completed prior to the school's opening, lists documents that must be submitted to the Charter School Office as part of the opening procedures process (as well as their due dates), and lists additional resources available to the school founders as they prepare to open the school's doors to students. The first section of the Handbook, "Material Terms of the Charter," focuses founding groups on further articulating the terms upon which the school's charter was granted. The second section of the Handbook, "School Administration," alerts school founders to regulations around the hiring, evaluation, and professional development of staff, as well as ensures that new charter schools are prepared to offer a full range of programs and services to their students, including special education, transportation, and nutrition services. The third section of the Handbook, "Organizational Viability," provides guidance to ensure that charter schools have the processes in place to perform due diligence in the responsible management of the school's fiscal affairs. Finally, the Opening Procedures Handbook identifies sources of additional information that may be useful to new charter schools as they grow from proposal to implementation. These range from statutory and regulatory citations to technical assistance and advisories published by the Department of Education, as well as Criteria for Approval for many of the documents requiring approval by the Charter School Office. Finally, the Handbook identifies sources of additional information that may be useful to new charter schools as they grow from proposal to implementation. These range from statutory and regulatory citations to technical assistance and advisories published by the Department of Education, as well as Criteria for Approval for many of the documents requiring approval by the Charter School Office. Eighteen appendixes conclude the Handbook.