It's still way, way early in the planning stages - "just an idea we're investigating," as Bill Cala puts it - but yesterday's public information meeting on a proposed metropolitan school drew a big crowd, nearly filling a chapel at Nazareth College.

Cala, former Fairport schools superintendent and, last year, interim superintendent in Rochester, has been meeting with several area superintendents, Nazareth representatives, and others to discuss the possibility of creating a public school on the Nazareth campus. It would be unusual in two respects: its students would come from both the city and suburban districts. And it would reject the kind of rigid curriculum and standardized testing that Cala says dehumanize education and hurt children.

The goal of combining city and suburban students would be to help break down the concentration of poverty in the Rochester school district - and to give students an educational experience that resembles the world they'll live in as adults. "Schools in the suburbs are not the real world," he said yesterday. "The real world is not 93 percent white. Schools in the city are not the real world, either. The real world is not 95 percent black."

If it were successful, the school could do more than help Rochester students. It could add to the national discussion about the harm that racial isolation is doing to students in urban districts.

We're a long way from the school become a reality. Among the obstacles: not only money but also convincing the state to let a school like this one opt out of state testing requirements. Yesterday's meeting, said Cala, was "a beginning dialogue." But as soon as the media publicized the idea, Cala started getting phone calls from teachers wanting to sign up.

Can the numerous hurdles be overcome? And if so, will there be enough interest - by parents in the suburbs, for instance - to pull this thing off?

Cala's hope is that other colleges will follow suit, creating other, similar schools. Without that, it'll be impossible to make much of a dent in the concentration of poverty in city schools - but that's an even bigger dream, raising many more hurdles.

It's encouraging, then, to see Nazareth President Daan Braveman, who has been leading his college in one innovation after another, backing the school. Braveman, who attended yesterday's meeting, could mean the difference between the creation of an isolated laboratory and a regional effort with national implications.

Coming up next: the creation of teams that will flesh out the school idea. You can get information from Cala at wcala9@naz.edu.