The work presents an account of an effort at education reform in Ladakh called Operation New Hope. It discusses how a civil society group, Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh, made efforts in partnership with local self-governance processes. It discusses aspects of the educational reforms experiment in-depth: the participating stakeholders, village communities and their institutions, its impact on the schools, staff and the learning process and further strategies it indicated for reforms. It details its experiences: how sharp boundaries were drawn when civil society incursions came to seen as capable of creating embarrassment for constituents of the governance processes.