By Ethan Dewitt
Concord Monitor
PEMBROKE, N.H. — Not too long ago, this was a consignment shop. Now it hosts books and whiteboards.
On a recent Tuesday, students at the PACE Career Academy – Pembroke’s charter high school — clumped around desks, tinkering with electronics in one room and crafts in the next.
Lindsay Levigne was helping finalize an arm on a competitive robot. Sidney Malachi was perfecting a sculpted tree. The scene was typical for a high school. The setting, though, has become a flashpoint for a bigger debate.
Days after Democratic lawmakers voted to reject the first installment of a $46 million federal grant to expand charter schools in the state, advocates for those schools have cried foul.
Democrats have said expanding would drain resources from existing traditional and charter public schools and be unsustainable in the long run. Republicans — and the state’s Department of Education Commissioner — have condemned the vote, arguing New Hampshire turned its back on a broad new approach.
But amid the recent rise in decades-long tensions between “neighborhood” public schools and chartered alternatives, PACE Career Academy boasts a unique calling card. It’s the only of New Hampshire’s 27 charter schools that was created by the school district it resides in.
And now, as the debate over the direction of New Hampshire’s school system picks up, PACE’s officials say it’s a model more districts should try.
“New Hampshire loves individual control,” said Jorge Santana, the school’s executive director. “We have an amazing relationship with our local district. It’s because they started us, and they understand us and we work really well together. So for me, I feel that there should really be some type of relationship that way (for others).”
Created in 2011, PACE — an acronym for the towns of Pembroke, Allenstown, Chichester and Epsom — is a high school with a focus: career readiness. The school specializes in connecting students to internships and work placements through high school, and encouraging paths to higher study among low-income families.
That was the intention when it was started up by a group of Pembroke Academy staff members who wanted a place to accommodate students for whom a smaller setting could be a benefit.
And it’s what brought Malachi — whose freshman year at her initial public school proved overwhelming — to the school in the first place.
“I was just looking at different high schools and my mom talked to me about it,” she said. “It was nice … the way they talked about the values. Actually focusing on careers.”
Like many charter schools, PACE is not operating at its full allotted capacity. While the school is approved for 80 students, it currently serves 55.
To Santana, that size is the school’s selling point. It provides an intimacy and personalization to the student’s education.
It’s part of a common argument from advocates of charter schools: They’re there for the students at the extremes.
For high-performing and low-performing students, the pitch goes, charter schools provide an outlet for them to be better catered to. Those performing in the middle excel better in their public-school classrooms when the first two populations have charter school options, Santana says.
PACE’s model is simple: a focus on academics, social and emotional support and workforce development — the “three-legged stool,” Santana says.
Class sizes vary, but most hover around 15 students. Some go as low as five or six.
There’s a gym, a “workout area,” a VIP room for students on good behavior to relax, and four classrooms for students to rotate through.
The schedule, meanwhile, is geared toward work experience. Students spend three hours in class in the morning, but the rest of the day is dedicated to internships and work experience.
For many, the school is something of a social hub.
“A lot of our young people will stay here,” Santana said. “The entire day, even when they don’t have classes.”
And the school’s size makes it nimbler in some areas, Santana says. Faculty members might show up in person to a student’s home to check in, he said.
Officials are able to tailor internships and apprenticeship opportunities to individual students, said Rachel Carver, the assistant director.
That’s important, given the income level of the student body, Carver added.
“Many of their parents are working two, three jobs,” she said. “A lot of our students can’t afford driver’s ed, or they were able to take driver’s ed but not afford a car.”
The barriers mean even if a dream internship opens up, it may not be accessible. PACE officials have to work with those dynamics to find things that will better fit, Carver said.
“We’re here trying to break the cycles of poverty, of lack of education, of mental health resources, and finding all of these barriers,” she said. “And transportation is a huge one for us.”
There are two approaches to creating a charter school: getting authorization through a school district and getting authorization through the state’s powerful Board of Education.
By taking the first route, PACE’s founding took a unique educational journey.
In 2010, faculty members of Pembroke Academy saw alarming drop-out rates and low proficiency scores. So they envisioned a new approach.
“The district was looking for a way to serve high school students who didn’t necessarily fit the profile of every thing that we know high school to be,” said Karen Guercia, assistant superintendent of SAU 53, and a co-founder of PACE.
Using a federal grant, Guercia and other founders guided their idea through a series of narrow hoops.
They secured three years of funding, won over school board officials, convinced residents to vote it in at town meeting, and won approval from the state Board of Education.
“The town was very supportive of it,” she said. “Once they understood that it was affording this option for the students.”
Then, they had three years to get it up and running — designing the space, buying equipment, hiring teachers, and populating it with students — before the grant money ran out and they were on their own.
These days, that stability has been reached, Santana and others say. Most of the new students come through word of mouth — from the parents looking for a different approach to the kids themselves.
And the connections with the school district have helped PACE thrive, Santana says. It means when new students come in from SAU 53, the charter school gets a detailed handoff — everything to help them adjust their teaching.
The districts that aren’t in this arrangement are often much less communicative, he said.
But outside Pembroke, convincing other school districts to authorize their own charter schools has historically been a harder sell.
In the 1990s, New Hampshire law allowed only for district-approved schools, and no school districts took up the opportunity. It was only when state law broadened to allow charters to also be authorized by the state board of education that the first schools became incorporated.
For districts, there are barriers. To start, there are simple worries over draining students and resources from one school to another. It’s a dynamic exacerbated by schools across the state facing dropping enrollments in recent decades — a trend looking unlikely to reverse soon.
Then there are financial concerns. Charter schools that are created by districts get a different arrangement than those approved by the state board of education.
For PACE, the lone district-approved school, towns in SAU 53 must pay 80% of the costs of tuition for a public student. That means property tax payers are on the hook for almost as much as they would be if the student attended a traditional public school.
For students at board-approved charter schools, the assistance comes nearly entirely from the state. Town taxpayers must still pay for some special-education costs — and busing — but most of the burden lies on the state education fund and the money the school raises itself.
That can create a dilemma of dueling priorities.
District-approved charters like PACE stand to receive more money from students in their area — 80% of tuition — than board-approved charters. But that means residents are responsible for much of that tab as well.
Board-approved charters, on the other hand, receive less in taxpayer assistance, but require less approval and buy-in from the towns.
“At the end of the day, it’s the students and the families who are getting the short end of the stick when these two options are fighting with each other,” Santana said.
PACE Career Academy has come a ways, officials say. Getting to its current Pembroke location was itself a journey. The school’s earlier location in Allenstown was bordered by the town’s transfer station —“not very good space messaging to our young people,” Santana said.
And the school is still growing, Santana says. Last year was the first time it had a wait list. Everyone on that list made it through.
For Malachi, it was a welcome change from what she had experienced in her previous school. While some teachers dedicated time and attention to individual students, others seemed to bounce between classrooms, she said.
“They were more focused on getting their work done and then leaving,” Malachi said. With 55 students, that isn’t an issue at PACE, she said.
Magnus Supan, another student, said he also appreciated the high teacher-to-studio ratio. But it was the focus on job development, he said, that appealed to him the most.
Supan had an idea of a career track, but then had second thoughts.
“They kind of like didn’t go against it, they went for it and said ‘alright, what are you interested in,’” he said of the teachers. He now plans to look into trade schools.
Santana has seen the value of a second chance himself. A high school dropout, he later found the support to continue his studies, becoming the first in his family to go college and later attaining a Master’s degree.
“My idea is that if that happens by dumb luck with me, you can set up systems to be able to catch those young people,” he said.
PACE, he argues, lives up to that. The school consists of 70% students who qualify for free or reduced lunch; and more than two thirds who receive special-education services — which are paid for by the public-school districts.
“It’s not for everybody, but for the young people that it works for, it makes all the difference,” he said.
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