Somerville educational nonprofit Sprout & Co., working with Somerville Public Schools, plans to open a new high school, Powderhouse Studios, on Broadway Avenue in 2018. Powderhouse Studios will occupy the currently-vacant Powder House Community School building and plans to enroll around 200 eighth graders through a specialized lottery system, according to Alec Resnick, founder of Sprout & Co. and future director of the school.
“Anyone can register to enroll, but there's a ... weighted lottery system that ... guarantee[s] that the folks who enroll are representative of the Somerville students at large, economically, demographically and in terms of proportion, special education and gender,” Resnick said.
A Different Type of High School
According to Susana Hernandez Morgan, director of communications and grants at Somerville Public Schools, the new school will play a different role in the school district in order to provide a new type of educational experience for participating students.
“Students thrive in different types of learning environments. Powderhouse Studios would provide a small, more intimate and specialized [environment] for students and families who are looking for something entirely different from the more traditional school,” Morgan told the Daily in an email. “It's important to provide a menu of quality choice for parents in Somerville.”
Resnick said the goal of Powderhouse Studios is to create an innovative and intimate learning setting.
“What we are looking towards is not just a place but a group of people who are learning and doing interesting projects on larger and larger time scales motivated by their own interests and priorities,” Resnick said. “Even though it might be a school on a paper, when somebody comes to it, [Powderhouse Studios] will feel and look more like a research lab or a design studio or an artist's workshop rather than a traditional school.”
According to Resnick, the students will be provided with laptops, tablets and phones in order to develop sets of skills in videography, interviewing and computational art. He added that the goal of the school is to work with young people and to translate their needs to concrete projects within the community by partnering with local organizations.
“Generally, the way we approach the process is that we don't come up with the task and tell [the students] what to do,” he said. “When we say that we are going to be very involved in the community, what we mean is that ... we want to have an audience other than us, so that means the works [of the students] will be deployed to different places.”
Bakhtiar Mikhak, a founding member of both Sprout & Co. and Powderhouse Studios, said the school will aim to help students develop new ideas and perspectives with projects, rather than simply get them to graduation.
“The goal is to separate the concern of things like standardized exams from the concern of helping young people to have a deep and meaningful learning,” Mikhak said. “Our goal is to not let one overshadow the other. The school is not to help pass through educational milestones just for the sake of passing those steps.”
Resnick said that students at Powderhouse Studios would not have to graduate in the traditional four years, but instead could graduate in the timespan they choose as long as they cover the materials in the Common Core State Standards Initiatives and pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System as mandated by the state.
“Some [students] might decide to [attend the school for] five or six years and some people might be able to [graduate] in two or three years,” Resnick said. “Our job is to let them grow into the next chapter of life and they don't have to leave until they decide to leave, unless they turn 22, as the school cannot support them forever.”
However, Resnick said the school will enroll 30 to 40 new students every year, regardless of the number of the students who leave the school.
Project Development
The idea of the new school arose about four years ago, when Somerville approached Sprout & Co. with an idea for an innovative school, according to Resnick.
“[Somerville Mayor Joseph Curtatone] reached out to us with the idea of potentially opening a new school, and so for the past four years [Sprout & Co.] developed that into the design and proposal for a new school,” Resnick said.
The plans for Powderhouse Studios were given a boost when the school was selected as one of the 10 winners of the XQ Institute’s Super School Project, an initiative to encourage new approaches to high school, funded by Laurene Powell Jobs, wife of Steve Jobs. Powderhouse Studios will receive $10 million dollars from the XQ Institute to be distributed over five years.
“XQ is interested in seeing more and more interesting schools and school models," Resnick said. "We are likely to be working with [XQ] around ongoing refinements and developments of the designs and operations of the school.”
According to Morgan, Somerville Public Schools does not anticipate Powderhouse Studios will disproportionately pull resources away from any other district school.
“Providing more options for families can result in a net enrollment increase and because it is such a specialized educational model, many of the students who enroll in Powderhouse Studios may be new to the district,” Morgan wrote. “The $10 million XQ Super School Award would be used in a phased-in approach so that in the first few years it will be private and public funding.”
Resnick also said that the new school will not affect the operation of Somerville High School, partly because Powderhouse Studios will have school-based budgeting, which will give the school more control over how its resources are spent.
“[Designers of the school] worked on the budget to make sure that nothing at Somerville High School will have to change just because Powderhouse Studios exists,” Resnick said. “Powderhouse, unlike other public schools, will have its own checking account and will be doing what's called school-based budgeting, which is more common in other states.”
Powderhouse Studios also expects to have a meaningful collaboration with local organizations like Tufts, according to Mikhak.
“I hope that there will be interest from the Tufts community to talk to us more and be involved with [Powderhouse Studios]," Mikhak said. “What we really need is more people who care and pay attention to education and I hope to see a lot more collaborations and connections with the people in the community.”
Somerville educational nonprofit to open new, non-traditional high school on Broadway
