At the age of 16, as the pandemic began, Charity McRae dropped out of Concord High School.

“I don’t learn like most traditional kids, so sitting in a classroom with 40 kids wasn’t really the best for me,” McRae said.

Over the ensuing four years, she got a puppy, started a job in fast food, and – after trying and failing twice to return to school – resigned herself to moving forward without a high school diploma.

Then her friend’s mother, Sarah Koutroubas, decided along with a group of others to open a new charter school in Concord.

In September, McRae, now 20, will be one of at least 30 students in the inaugural class of Synergy Academy. The school – which emphasizes project-based courses and bucks the traditional notion of grades in favor of a competency-based model of advancement – is part of a recent charter school expansion in New Hampshire.

Of the state’s 34 charter schools, 11 have opened or been approved by the Board of Education in the last five years, and the state’s charter school enrollment has grown 35% over that period, from 4,228 students in 2019 to 5,695 last year.

That growth – in New Hampshire and across the country – has at times pitted traditional public school advocates against those, like Koutroubas, who argue that charter schools can provide valuable alternative learning opportunities for students who don’t thrive in their larger, assigned schools.

“In a traditional public school, due to the fact that there are so many students, you can’t customize an education,” Koutroubas said. “We want to partner and find students where this type of learning style is going to hopefully change the way that they view their own education.”

McRae said she would not be returning to high school if she had not found Synergy. She is collaborating with Koutroubas to craft a schedule that will allow her to get her diploma while she continues to work and care for her dog, and isn’t yet sure how many more credits she needs or how long the process will take.

“Going back is a big step,” McRae acknowledged at a school open house this week.

A charter school boom

New Hampshire’s charter school boom has been driven in part by a $46 million federal grant awarded to New Hampshire in 2019 that has helped 14 new charter schools get off the ground. Synergy was awarded $1.5 million through the startup grant while another new area school, Benjamin Franklin Academy in Loudon, received $1.1 million, according to the state Department of Education.

Synergy Academy hopes to enroll 64 students this year and ultimately expand to 128 students by the 2028-29 school year, according to its charter. Benjamin Franklin Academy, which opened last year for students in grades six through nine, had 44 students at the end of last year and aims to ultimately expand to 175 students in grades six through 12.

Despite their recent growth, charter schools still educate a relatively small fraction of the state’s students. In 2023, 86% of students attended district public schools, while 3% attended charter schools, according to Reaching Higher NH, a nonpartisan education policy organization.

Nonetheless, funding debates surrounding charter school expansion have grown contentious. Opponents of charter schools argue that they divert badly needed funding away from community public schools, while proponents say charter schools spend a fraction of the per-pupil cost.

Both claims have merit: Charter schools do not receive any funding from local property taxes, but they do receive the state adequacy aid that would have otherwise gone to the school district – which was $4,100 at base level last year. Charter schools then receive an additional $4,900 per student in state money.

Charter schools, on average, also spend about half as much per student as public school districts. In 2021-22, the average per-pupil district public school allocation was $19,400, as compared to $9,985 at the charter school level, according to a Department of Education report.

Part of the disparity comes down to the students each school educates. While both district schools and charter schools are public, and therefore legally must educate all students, charter schools in reality are not always equipped to provide required services to students with extremely high special education needs.

For example, Bill Hayes, the dean of students at Benjamin Franklin Academy, said his school encouraged the family of one student to return to a public school after last year.

“We were hurting him because we couldn’t provide” the special education services he needed, Hayes said. “So I talked to the mother and we basically sent him back to his school district.”

Koutroubas, who has met with the Concord school district’s superintendent, dismissed the notion that the goals of charter schools and district public schools are in conflict.

“It’s a partnership with traditional public schools,” she said.

Who are charter schools for?

Koutroubas, who grew up in Concord attending the city’s public schools, was herself not a “traditional” student. She has attention deficit disorder, struggled in class, and graduated a semester early, before ultimately rising up through the ranks of a disability advocacy organization.

Koutroubas and her co-founder, Adrienne Evans, met as classmates at Rundlett Middle School. Evans went on to run a therapy-based summer camp for families of children with developmental disabilities.

Koutroubas and Evans say Synergy Academy is a school where they, their young adult children, and some of the children they worked with in their previous professional lives could have thrived.

“Those are our people,” Koutroubas said. “The underdogs, the kids that need extra support, the ones that are figuring out life.”

Upon entering Synergy Academy, each student will receive a personal learning plan that guides their high school experience. Class sizes will max out at 16, and coursework will be project-based. In civics, which will be taught by Koutroubas, students will write a piece of legislation and follow it through the legislative process. In English, they’ll produce a documentary.

At a recent open house, Koutroubas, Evans, and their new staff tried to sell prospective students on a vision of education that in some cases was a radical departure from what they were familiar with.

Brayden Minehart, who attended Pembroke Academy for his first two years of high school, initially felt Synergy Academy was “too small.”

“I can’t hide myself from people as easily as I can in an actual school,” said Minehart as he toured the new school, which is located at the back of an office park off of I-93 and tucks a lot into a fairly compressed footprint.

But his mother, Carrie Montoya, felt he was more interested than he was letting on. She said the curriculum at Pembroke Academy was not the right fit for Minehart and he kept getting into trouble.

“It’s not working where we’re at, so we have to figure something else out,” she said.

New English teacher Jenny Desrosiers tried to convince Minehart to come to Synergy by telling him that he wouldn’t need to write in her class if he didn’t want to, as long as he could communicate what he was learning in a different way, such as through an audio recording.

That – along with several trays of cookies and brownies and a hot dog machine – seemed to convince Minehart to reconsider.

“I’m thinking about it,” he offered, about an hour after he had dismissed the school as too small.

Unlike Synergy, Benjamin Franklin Academy does not have a “target student,” said Hayes, the school’s dean.

“My philosophy here is if you have a student who wants to learn, whether they enjoyed the public school system, whether they enjoyed the private school system, if this environment fits them and provides them the greatest opportunity to progress, . . . then that’s what we’re trying to do here,” said Hayes, who previously taught in public schools for more than two decades.

The school takes a history-centric approach to the curriculum and also focuses on hands-on learning opportunities, with a particular focus on agriculture, artisan, and industrial trades.

Hayes said the school’s first year presented growing pains. Because their building was not yet ready, students and staff spent the first several months in a temporary location at a church a mile away. When they did get into their new building, the septic tank flooded.

But the important things – that the 40-some-odd students were happy and learning – were all a success, according to Hayes.

“These kids enjoy being here, they come to learn, they are non-judgmental, they do respect each other, and they accept each other for who and what they are,” Hayes said. “The rest of it: It’s all garbage. All the political stuff, all the other stuff that’s found its way into education? Education’s education. Kids are kids.”

Jeremy Margolis can be contacted at jmargolis@cmonitor.com.