This is my first entry in this conversation, I'm not sure what the original commenter had in mind.
But I had just picked woodworking for an example but no. I want them to also have access to welding, sewing, cooking, gardening etc. Some of these can be offered very cheaply, some can't.
I still don't think it would usually make sense for them all to be centralized somewhere other than a school. In places with multiple schools, they may not all have every resource available, and students may have to be shifted around to get them to the tools and educators they need.
But this is already the case in a lot of the US! and esp at the high school level not every school has every program when talking about things like marching band, robotics, individual sports, rotc.
I actually teach an after school programming class at the local high school, interested students are bussed over from several other schools in the district immediately after the last class. There is a whole subfleet of buses to shift kids around so they end up at the correct other school for baseball practice or python class or whatever. So this is already a live problem with working solutions in some districts.
> independent entity offering curriculum that residents can express demand for and choose from
Kind of like a community college? That seems to be the most similar existing institution to what we're talking about. Or should high schools just work more like community colleges?
IDK. Again though I think the solution is just to adequately fund the education system we have rather than try to make a new, side-by-side, intentionally incomplete one. If there's no additional funding coming, then that won't work either and public schools are still the entity that is closest to being able to meet this need with the least additional resources.