Lebanon’s Ledyard Charter School seeks to expand

LEBANON — Willow Raymond and her mother, Crystal Kerin-Herrick, sat in a classroom Friday morning at Ledyard Charter School eating brunch prepared by the 10th grader’s peers.

Raymond, 15, is in her second year at Ledyard and her favorite subject is history. Like her schoolmates, she started attending the charter school after struggling in traditional public schools in the Upper Valley.

“I am definitely a person with a lot of anxiety,” said Raymond, of Canaan, who began ninth grade at Lebanon High School before transferring. “It wasn’t a good fit for me.”

But Ledyard has been — for both mother and daughter. Raymond in particular likes the extra time teachers take to help students.

“We definitely exhausted all our other options before coming here,” Kerin-Herrick said.

Like her daughter, Kerin-Herrick has been most impressed by Ledyard’s educators.

“She enjoys coming to school,” Kerin-Herrick said about Raymond.

Ledyard Charter School was founded in 2009 as an alternative high school for students who were not thriving academically, socially or behaviorally in traditional school settings. Since its founding, it changed locations in Lebanon around five times before settling at its current location at 39 Hanover St., which it purchased in 2020. Classes are small. Last spring, for example, eight seniors graduated from Ledyard, with the majority entering the workforce.

Now, leaders at Ledyard are hoping to renovate the second floor of their building so that they can serve more students like Raymond and her peers. There are currently 50 students at the school — the largest enrollment ever — Executive Director Wendy Kozak said. When the second floor is finished, there will be spots for at least 15 more students. Kozak has no doubt that the school will be able to fill those slots: The last two school years, there has been a waiting list.

“Right now there’s a pretty high demand, and we don’t have enough space,” Kozak said in a phone interview Thursday.

Currently, the school has four full-time teachers and would need to hire at least one more, Kozak said.

The current student to teacher ratio is between 13:1 and 14:1, and Kozak said she does not want to go above a 15:1 ratio.

The majority of Ledyard’s students live in Lebanon and the Mascoma Valley, Kozak said. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, most students joined Ledyard after trying out public school for a couple of years. Now, students are starting Ledyard at a younger age: This year’s freshman class has 10 students; last year’s freshman class had 15.

“More people are thinking of us as their first choice other than their backup interest,” said Lucretia Witte, chairwoman of Ledyard’s board.

Kozak attributes part of the rising interest in Ledyard to “the repercussions of remote learning,” she said.

“A lot of our students were not successful with remote learning because they’re more hands on,” Kozak said. “I saw a big increase in interest after that.”

The building — located at the end of the Lebanon Mall near Village Pizza — is 10,780 square feet and the school currently uses 5,530 square feet on the first floor, with the entrance is near the parking lot behind City Hall. The second floor is 5,250 square feet and once the renovation is complete, there will be an entrance that faces the Lebanon Mall. The renovation is expected to cost around $200,000 total, Kozak said.

“We renovated a large portion of the upstairs, but now we need an elevator,” she said.

So far, the school has raised $53,000. If they raise another $50,000, the Jack and Dorothy Byrne Foundation has agreed to match that amount. They are $47,000 away from getting the match, Kozak added.

If the school is able to raise the money by April, the goal is to install the elevator over the summer and increase the size of the student body during the 2024-2025 school year, Kozak said. After the elevator is installed, the school can begin using the portion of the second floor that it renovated for $30,000 this summer. Next, school leaders will work to raise an additional $50,000 to complete the second phase of the second floor upgrades.

In addition to classroom space, the plan is to put in a maker space and a bike shop where students can learn mechanical skills, Witte said. There also is talk about hosting more community events, such as exhibitions featuring students’ maker space creations.

“Think about how fun that would be for our community and our students, to be able to have those types of events where the public is welcomed in and the kids can show off their work,” Witte said.

During Friday’s brunch, students also were accepting donations for a silent auction that is scheduled to be held from 3 to 6 p.m. on Nov. 3, to raise money for the renovation. The gathering was one of many organized by students in teacher Marianne St-Laurent’s event planning class this year.

Senior Aniken Norwalk is one of nine students in the class. Norwalk was not cooking, but planned to help wash dishes.

“I absolutely love it,” Norwalk said about the class. “We choose what we do with it.”

Students reached out to business owners and other community members to ask for donations for the auction. St-Laurent, a teacher at the school for six years, said that students planned everything from creating posters to deciding what to cook. They’ve also improved their communication and problem-solving skills, including anticipating possible issues and figuring out solutions as they come up.

Norwalk, of Canaan, said the class has been good practice in learning how to talk to people and organize an event. This is the third year at Ledyard for Norwalk, who said the best part of the school is “the individuality.”

“It’s so catered to your needs in every possible way,” said Norwalk, 17, whose favorite subjects are English and history.

Liz Sauchelli can be reached at esauchelli@vnews.com or 603-727-3221.