Disappointed with the education that his daughter, Briana, was receiving in the Cambridge public school system, Robert L. Hall decided to take matters into his own hands.

"She just wasn't being challenged," Hall says, referring to his daughter's days at Iitzgerald Elementary School.

Briana is now a happy second-grader at the Benjamin Banneker School, Cambridge's first and only charter school, located in North Cambridge.

And her father is a satisfied parent.

Part of a nationwide charter school movement, the Banneker school opened its doors this past September, joining over 400 charter schools currently operating across the country.

A type of independent public school, a charter school is usually started by parents, teachers, businesses and community leaders who are dissatisfied with the curriculum and teaching methods or fed up with budget battles and bureaucracy at traditional schools.

"Here was an opportunity for parents and teachers to do something they wanted to do--run a public school the way they wanted it to be run," says Charles S. Nesson '60, Weld professor of law at the Harvard Law School, who helped form the school's charter proposal.

"The mission grew out of this body of parents and teachers who wanted school to be friendly to those students who felt alienated by the public school system," Nesson says.

Banneker aims to help minority students succeed academically by emphasizing math, science and technology in its curriculum.

"We believe there is an over-enrollment of children of color in special education, and we don't believe they all belong there," says Afiya Graham, the school's executive director. "Our conviction is that we have intelligent children who are misunderstood and mislabeled."

Graham identifies many of the school's 190 students as "children marginalized by Cambridge public schools."

"When you look at the demographics, these children are overwhelmingly African-American males, so the school began with a commitment that children can excel in math and science," Graham says.

But as mainstream as the subject matter may sound, the school has chosen to emphasize these areas in a non-traditional manner.

Structured around interdisciplinary, thematic units, the school's curriculum is centered around the study of particular groups of people, for example, those in African nations or on Caribbean islands.

"We apply a strategy that ensures we cover the depth of the people," Graham says. "If we end up on African soil, we talk about everything--temperature, the equator, geography and the land."