By the time Mary Perry pulled up to a brick building at the back of a nondescript Concord office park last August, two years had passed since her daughter, Sophie, had last stepped foot in a school.
In 2022, brutal bullying drove Sophie Perry from Pittsfield Middle High School.
“She was receiving death threats,” her mother said.
That year, Sophie missed 78 days of school. After pulling her from Pittsfield, the family tried homeschooling and the state’s virtual learning academy. Neither alternative worked well.
“We were feeling very discouraged and unsure of how we were going to proceed,” Mary said. “She was diagnosed with a phobia of being in school. We knew we had to do something; we just weren’t sure what it was.”
Desperate for a solution, Mary and Sophie, then 15, arrived last fall in the parking lot of Synergy Academy, a newly opened charter high school off of Interstate 93’s Exit 16 in Concord.
For 45 minutes, Mary worked to coax Sophie out of the car. That first day, she lasted 20 minutes inside.
Over the coming weeks, Sophie, an artistic, music-obsessed teenager with shoulder-length hair often weaved tightly in twin braids, continued to show up. Twenty minutes turned into an hour, then two, and finally, by the end of September, a full day.
By January, Sophie was spending more time during the week at Synergy than she was at home. After not speaking in school during the first weeks, she had transformed into a sometimes-sarcastic, sass-filled teenager, bouncing around from the school’s 3-D printer-equipped technology room to the classroom of her favorite teacher, Logan Cassin, with whom she was engaged in a playful prank war.
In its first year, Synergy became a haven for dozens of students like Sophie, fulfilling the vision of the school’s two lead co-founders, Sarah Koutroubas and Adrienne Evans.
But as many students excelled, Koutroubas and Evans, friends since their days as Concord middle schoolers, navigated a seemingly never-ending barrage of financial obstacles that they say tested New Hampshire’s reputation as a welcoming state for charter schools – particularly for those, like Synergy, without wealthy donors.
“Not all charter schools have wealthy board members who are interested in making financial commitments.”
Sarah koutroubas, synergy academy co-founder
Amid New Hampshire’s Republican-led embrace of school choice, charter schools in the state are booming. Enrollment in the schools, which are public, has increased 44% over the last six years, according to the Department of Education, and 13 schools, including Synergy, have opened in that period.
But during that time, six schools have also closed. All six have cited financial challenges or declining enrollment, according to the Department of Education.
The triumphs of Synergy’s first year, which the Concord Monitor chronicled through a series of visits and interviews with students, parents and the co-founders, show that a school like theirs fills a critical gap in the educational landscape for students in the Concord region. The financial challenges Synergy faced, meanwhile, raise questions about whether the state and federal government programs designed to support charter schools are working as intended.
The challenges of leveraging government aid
When Koutroubas and Evans, along with a team of others, decided to open a high school for students who had struggled in traditional educational settings, the group was under no illusions that the process would be easy. Nearly three-quarters of the students who enrolled during their first year had a documented disability. Some of them, like Sophie, were coming off of long periods of absence from school. Several had attempted suicide.
However, amidst increasing support for charter schools in New Hampshire and nationally, they expected to lean on financial assistance provided by state and federal programs. Instead, they said they became entangled in a system riddled with bureaucratic red tape, featuring what they described as unworkable requirements that blocked them from using available funding where it was needed most.
For example, the $1.5 million Synergy received as part of a $46 million federal grant secured by New Hampshire to aid charter school expansion couldn’t be used to cover rent or staff salaries once the school opened to students.
“That is what charter schools need money for,” Koutroubas said. “Those are the things that will make or break your program. Rent is expensive. Not all charter schools have wealthy board members who are interested in making financial commitments.”
The $50,000 per year available from the state to help offset rent seemed promising, but elusive. Synergy was ineligible for that aid due to the terms of its lease. The program requires participating schools to include an exit clause in their leases. Koutroubas and Evans said such a clause, which would allow both the landlord and tenant to terminate the agreement early, would be too risky, because it could leave the school without a building.
The federal school lunch program was a similar quagmire. Synergy can’t apply until it rips up the carpeted floors of its kitchen and replaces them with linoleum, which would cost $30,000. While the federal startup grant would cover the cost, it is a reimbursement-based program, and Koutroubas and Evans said they couldn’t afford to front the money.
The state has no control over the federal grant program. Kim Houghton, the spokesperson for the New Hampshire Department of Education, said schools must agree to its terms before applying.
“These grants are reimbursement-based, which makes effective cash flow management essential and often requires access to loans and lines of credit to leverage the grant,” she wrote in a statement. “This can be challenging for new organizations.”
Houghton said that public funds often come with “strings attached.”
“It is essential that safeguards are in place to ensure they are used transparently, responsibly, and in alignment with statutory requirements,” she wrote.
Last year, a Boscawen woman pleaded guilty to embezzling over $73,000 in federal funds that she received to start a charter school in Concord that has since closed.
Without state aid and facing limits on how Synergy could use the federal grant, the school has relied mainly on state adequacy payments to fund its expenses. Charter schools are often hailed for educating students with less expense than district schools. The money provided by the state to charters – a base payment of $9,000 per student in 2023-24 – is less than half of the average cost per student at district schools – $21,545 per student that year. However, the state provides more than double the base aid to charter schools than to district schools, because charter schools don’t rely on local property taxes to raise additional revenue.
Koutroubas and Evans said they have found the state allocation insufficient.
“$9,100 per kid just doesn’t get you to where you need to be,” Koutroubas said, referring to the amount the school received per student last year.
Many charter schools rely heavily on donations, but Synergy has found fundraising difficult. Unlike some peers, it doesn’t offer a classical curriculum, which can be perceived as ideological, or cater to specific subjects, like the Nashua-based Academy for Science and Design. Many foundations that might support Synergy’s mission have reflexively balked at contributing because of the political baggage charter schools carry within the education world.
Last September, just as school was opening, Koutroubas and Evans stopped collecting paychecks in order to keep the school afloat. The pair has also put tens of thousands of dollars of their own money into the school.
In the spring, they took out a $200,000 line of credit from Manchester’s Primary Bank – the type of loan that they said can be hard to come by for many charter school startups.
“We’re incredibly lucky,” Evans said. “The bank we worked with was willing to take a risk on us, but most banks are not willing to fund charter schools because of the closure rate.”
Through the grant and by foregoing their own paychecks, the school ended its first year without a deficit and has begun its second with a balanced budget, but all of the obstacles the co-founders encountered in the first year remain.
Addressing student needs
As Koutroubas and Evans wade through the financial obstacles, they are also navigating a student population with exceedingly high needs.
Late last fall, after working a typical 12-hour day, Koutroubas got a text message from a student at around 8:30 p.m. one night alerting her that a classmate had sent a photo of a row of pill bottles lined up.
By the time emergency responders arrived at the student’s house, the child was unresponsive. But, because of the classmate’s quick thinking, they survived.
Many students had, like Sophie, experienced pervasive bullying prior to arriving at Synergy.
“Previously, I went to Merrimack Valley High School, and I got severely bullied there,” Addi Kiernan testified before the House Education Policy and Administration committee last spring, as the lawmakers considered a bullying prevention bill.
“I got death threats and I was told, ‘Addi, cut yourself deeper,’” she said. “I was told places to go that would work to kill myself.”
For Koutroubas – the school’s co-director, but also its bus driver, civics teacher, advisory teacher, plumber and janitor – and Evans – fellow co-director, art teacher, advisory teacher, grant and report writer, extended learning opportunity director and leader of internships – each day can feel like “an emotional rollercoaster,” Evans said.
Managing special education services has proven to be a particular challenge. In a school where more than two-thirds of students have individualized education plans, Koutroubas and Evans said they collectively attend about 10 special education meetings per week.
District schools are responsible for either providing the students’ services themselves or paying for the cost of the charter school to provide them, but Koutroubas said the system is broken.
In many cases, when students enroll at Synergy, district schools unilaterally reduce services they were previously eligible for, perhaps because they believe – erroneously, according to Koutroubas and Evans – that some of the services were built into Synergy’s model.
In other cases, district schools provide money for Synergy to hire specialists of their own at a rate too low to attract anyone qualified. And when Synergy fronts the costs, “it’s an absolute nightmare” to get district schools to reimburse them, Evans said.
Still, Koutroubas and Evans said that they provide the services their students need whether or not they receive compensation for them.
“If a traditional program worked for these kids, there wouldn’t be a need for this school,” Koutroubas said. “So we have to do things differently. We have to do what is needed for the students that we have in our program.”
Varied challenges
As last year progressed, Synergy navigated the challenge of educating students with vastly different types of experience. For some students, like Sophie, the work itself came relatively easy but feeling safe in a school setting took time. For others, gaps in schooling meant that they had fallen behind academically.
“You had kids who attended school – whatever that looked like – during COVID, and then you had kids who simply stopped going and hadn’t been in school for four years,” Koutroubas said. “They don’t know a lot of the basics, like taking turns or not speaking over someone.”
One morning last September, two weeks into the school year, a group of six students seated at rows of tables learned about parts of speech.
“What are verbs?” the first slide of the teacher’s presentation read. She directed them to draw pictures of action items.
“I don’t have that big of a brain to know what this is,” a student said, perhaps half-jokingly, as he played a game on his phone. Others goofed off, made fart noises, or asked to go to the bathroom.
On the other side of the building, Cassin, the social studies teacher, introduced his students to the Progressive Era. All but one student appeared to listen intently as he described the Muckrakers and assigned a project.
Over the course of last year, Koutroubas and Evans played around with the lengths of class periods. The school has traditional courses, but it is project-based and welcomes outside-of-the-box independent study courses, as well. For many students, crafting a course schedule can feel a little like completing a jigsaw puzzle because the holes in their transcripts vary widely.
Last year, two teachers came and went. Some students left, too – either temporarily or permanently. Overall, though, enrollment – a critical figure because it determines how much state aid schools receive – steadily grew, from 19 students on day one to 41 on the last day of school.
“Sarah and I had to make a lot of sacrifices to make it through this year,” Evans said this summer, “and there were several times where we just weren’t sure what was going to happen, but luckily we were able to make it work.”
Year two
When school opened late last month, it was evident the building had grown far more full. The school had gone from two classrooms at the start of last year to six. Synergy, which places a heavy emphasis on creativity, also has a fully decked-out production studio, art room, Yogibo room for relaxation, and technology room, complete with five 3-D printers.
In addition to those many rooms, new students and staff were there to fill them. 74 students are currently enrolled, one below Koutroubas’ and Evan’s goal of 75 for the year. The new students, many of whom had been recruited by their current classmates, came from a mix of area district schools, other charter schools and from homeschooling setups.
The school had also hired six new staff members: three new teachers and three paraprofessionals.
But the clearest sign of Synergy’s transformation came in the form of the students who were beginning their second year.
At Concord High School, Connor Greenwood had largely stopped going to class. In hindsight, he said, he had been practically begging for help.
“They just didn’t care about you at all,” he said. “I had so many missing assignments and they didn’t say anything to me. I could have been going to a learning center and they were sending everybody else but me. And I actually wanted to go to those things and get help.”
At Synergy, he got it.
“They care more,” he said. “I feel like CHS never really gave me the attention I needed.”
Sophie, too, is continuing to ride the momentum she built last fall. After missing roughly two years of school, she completed eight of 20 credits needed to graduate high school.
An aspiring sports and event photographer, she also launched two companies – one for her photography business and another to sell jewelry. In July, she served as the photographer at a music festival in Springfield, Mass. in which she had to go up to the musicians and introduce herself.
“Soph is an amazing artist, but she has pretty severe social anxiety,” Evans said. “We were super proud of her.”
At Synergy, she has her own dedicated space, a closet-sized room in the front-right corner of the school, which she describes as her “oasis.” The room, full of 3-D-printed bracelets and sailboats, will serve as the hub for a major project she is undertaking this year: the creation of a documentary about Red Sox outfielder Jarren Duran.
Duran disclosed in a Netflix series last year that he attempted suicide and has been open about his mental health since.
“His story has been super impactful for me because I dealt with so much mental health,” said Sophie, a diehard Red Sox fan. “It literally has helped me in places I did not know was possible.”
It is not in Sophie’s nature to reflect on her own journey, but she plans to incorporate her story into the film, as well.
“I went from struggling to do any school to doing way too much,” she said last week. “Everyone’s doing beginning of the year projects and I’m full on making a documentary as quickly as I can.”
As she works on the documentary, she is wrestling with whether to reach out to Duran to tell him about it.
“I have a massive fear of rejection and a massive fear of things going right for me,” she said.
Before games, Duran tapes a message on his wrist that reminds him of what he has overcome. If Sophie ever meets her favorite Sox player, a handshake will reveal an identical phrase engraved in a bracelet she made using one of Synergy’s 3-D printers.
“Still Alive,” it reads.
If you need help
- National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: If you or someone you know needs support now, call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org.
- NH Rapid Response Access Point: If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health and/or substance use crisis, call/text 1-833-710-6477 to speak to trained clinical staff.