Step into the CSI Charter School in Penacook and you're not likely to find a bell buzzing between classes, teachers standing at the front of classrooms lecturing pupils on math and history, or students standing around gossiping in the hallways.
Things are done a little differently at CSI. For starters, the school doesn't have teachers, it has coaches. There isn't structured class time, either: Students come in on their own time, during designated school hours, and work with the coaches to complete work. For one reason or another, students who attend have had a hard time graduating from a traditional high school. The mission of CSI, according to social studies coach Geri Gormley, is to develop inpidualized plans for students in areas they are lacking. Credits from transcripts are translated into competencies, and each student requires 90 competencies to graduate.
The school, Gormley said, offers a unique way for students to graduate with a high school diploma, even if the traditional high school model didn't work for them.
“It is just so different than any other school,” she said. “It offers a lot of flexibility.”
Students said they liked working one-on-one with the coaches to design their own curriculum, and appreciate the freedom CSI offers.
Phil Jewell, 18, of Loudon, is a former Merrimack Valley student. He's taking classes at NHTI through a CSI program and hopes to transfer full-time to the college to study historic anthropology. Jewell said he was asked to leave Merrimack Valley for being “a disruption” for challenging his teachers. The charter school, he said, is a better fit because he's encouraged to think more critically about the subjects he's learning.
“The people who come here are intelligent, but they just don't fit in at a normal school,” Jewell said. “I don't run into the same roadblocks because it's just me doing the learning. You're judged on the work that you do, it's not as repetitive. It puts a lot more of the learning in my hands.”
About 40 students attend CSI, according to Director Paulette Fitzgerald, and all of the school's six coaches are former Merrimack Valley teachers. The only requirements for the students, she said, is that they must attend at least six hours of class time per week and graduate by the age of 21, as mandated by state law.
For 20-year-old resident Brittany Reed, a former Merrimack Valley student, the school offered a new outlook on education.
“The environment just wasn't the best for me. I liked school, I liked going to school, but it wasn't a good environment,” she said. “Now, school is my number one priority. I want this more than anything.”
(Ben Conant contributed to this report.)
