By DAVID CORRIVEAU
Valley News
HAVERHILL (AP) — The former apartment house on Woodsville’s King Street had seen better days even before the Haverhill School District started sending high school students there 15 years ago for help catching up academically and socially.
Yet the students keep coming to the King Street School, not only from Woodsville but from surrounding school districts. This academic year, the staff is seeing between 16 and 18 students a day in a program designed for 14.
“We had four kids the year we opened, and we’re full all the time now,” founding Principal Willy Kingsbury said last week. “We’ve got a waiting list. In addition to the school district, we have kids from Rivendell, Oxbow, Blue Mountain, Lin-Wood, Littleton and Monroe.”
Kingsbury and his team — a head teacher, an administrative assistant who also helps with teaching, a counselor and the school district’s psychologist — offer services ranging from remedial learning and mental health counseling to what the school describes on its home page as “a positive, safe environment that promotes inquiry and an appreciation for lifelong learning.” While some students are under specific special education plans, others cycle through for varying amounts of time as they deal with emotional and family issues as well as peer pressure.
“Once they get here, it’s kind of like a small family,” Kingsbury said. “Our mission is credit recovery, helping each student catch up with their class, and dealing with what other needs they might have. Where we can, we try to get them back to their sending school.”
King Street is delivering those services in a building that one school official described to voters during Haverhill’s annual school district meeting in March, as “a disaster. It’s got mold; it’s got dirt cellars.” Haverhill voters subsequently approved, as part of an overall plan of $3.7 million for renovations and construction throughout the district, the district’s proposal to raze and replace the current King Street building.
“We do the best we can,” Kingsbury said. “It’s not a great setup.”
Within those physical challenges, the school is receiving $370,000 in tuition payments, at rates of $38,761 for students from outside the district and $23,106 from towns within the district, and expects to receive more than $350,000 in 2018-2019. That revenue is helping the district reduce its own contribution to the operation from $231,000 this year to $161,742 next.
Michael Galli, dean of students at Rivendell Academy, this week described King Street as “a valued resource. In our experience, they do great things with the kids.”
Each of them brings her or his own strengths and challenges.
“We’re in the trenches here,” Kingsbury said. “You never know from day to day what you’re going to get. We try to calm them down, get more academic focus, whatever they need to get back to their own school and their own classes at some point.
“The kids we see have trouble sitting for long periods of time, for various reasons. We have smaller classes that last for no more than 40 or 45 minutes. We allow kids to roam, things the regular public school cannot. You’ve got to adapt to what each individual kid brings.”
Unlike public charter schools, which the state of New Hampshire sanctions as independent schools, King Street does not award diplomas. It’s an experiment that Kingsbury, a 1992 graduate of Oxbow High School, has been adapting since SAU 23 brought him in to oversee the program in 2003.
“The kids didn’t know what to expect,” Kingsbury said. “We were new to them, they were new to us.”
With a bachelor’s degree in exercise science, Kingsbury re-trained to focus on special education. The rest of his training has been on the job. In recent years, he estimated, more than 85 percent of the students who have passed through have completed their secondary education, either through graduation from their high schools or through general equivalency diplomas. Some have gone on to apprenticeships through the Job Corps, and others are working at area businesses, including the wire mill in nearby Lisbon, N.H.
“I see kids in different areas who come back and say, ‘I got a job,’ “ Kingsbury said. “That’s the reward for us. A productive adult is what we strive for.”
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Information from: Lebanon Valley News, www.vnews.com
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