LEBANON — A charter school focused on literacy has secured a lease on a Lebanon building that the school’s backers plan to renovate to welcome students next fall.
Cornerstone Charter School, which received its charter from the state earlier this year, finalized a deal in September to lease part of a building at 325 Mount Support Road. The initial lease is for 12,000 square feet of space, Lynne Howard, co-founder and executive director of Cornerstone, said in a phone interview.
“My original thought was that we were going to start small and expand,” Howard said. But school officials decided it made more sense to find a larger space the school could grow into. The lease will enable the school to use all of the building’s 27,000 square feet as enrollment grows.
The school also is working on an option to purchase the building, which once housed SegTel, a telecom company. Part of the building is currently leased to Hypertherm, a manufacturer of plasma cutters, as warehouse space.
The building was constructed in 1964 and renovated twice since then. The property includes 4.3 acres and is currently assessed for tax purposes at $1.43 million, according to city records. The monthly rent is just under $12,000.
The school’s backers plan to open next fall with grades K-3, then add a grade each year until the school houses grades K-8. Enrollment opens on Dec. 1, Howard said. The school will start hiring teachers in the spring, once enrollment numbers start to shape up. The school’s charter application envisions 16 students in each grade for a starting enrollment of up to 64 pupils. That would double by the 2029-30 school year.
Charter schools are public schools, but often carry a specific purpose or focus. Cornerstone plans to implement the Orton-Gillingham method of reading instruction, which was designed in the 1930s and ’40s for what was then known as “word blindness,” but is now called dyslexia, Howard said. The method engages all of a would-be reader’s senses and faculties, including hearing, sight, speech and touch, to create the neural network that enables the development of reading skills.
Orton-Gillingham also breaks language down into sounds, and trains readers how to recognize parts of words, such as suffixes and prefixes, and word roots from Latin and Greek.
“It’s really about the structure of the English language,” Howard said.
Literacy has been a flash point in the grinding national controversies over education, with so-called “whole language” instruction, which immerses students in language and its meaning to facilitate learning, as the norm in many schools over the past few decades. Whole language replaced phonics, which emphasizes teaching how the sounds of words translate into text, but the tide has lately shifted back as student reading scores on standardized tests have declined.
The whole language method is insufficient, Howard said. “They really need to have a systematic approach,” she said. “We actually need to know how to decode.”
Cornerstone is meant to appeal to parents whose children might not find a good fit in their local public schools. Though both New Hampshire and Vermont have turned toward emphasizing phonics in language instruction for children up to third grade, change is slow, Howard said.
Howard, a Lyme resident who previously lived in Unity for nearly 30 years and raised her children there, started the lower elementary program at Newport Montessori school, and then served as a reading and writing specialist at Charlestown Primary School for 11 years.
She said she did not want to criticize the public school system, but noted that “one-size-fits-all just does not work for anything.”
In a subsequent email, Howard explained more fully: “Our goal is to improve public education by offering a tuition-free, public school option for families who need an alternative approach. As they say, a rising tide lifts all boats.”
“We could have chosen a private school model, but that would have been a barrier for some families. Our goal is to serve the community through our nonprofit public school and to work together with district schools to strengthen education for all children.”
To that end, Cornerstone plans to offer workshops in literacy instruction, collaborate with public schools on IEP implementation to support students with disabilities and engage with district and regional school leaders, among other initiatives.
Thus far, a federal grant of $1.5 million has covered the school’s start-up costs, including staff, insurance, curriculum development and furnishings. School officials also are applying for a SAFE grant through a New Hampshire program that pays for security updates at public schools.
More important to the school’s long-term success is its pitch to private donors, at first for help with renovation costs. While charter schools are public and free to attend for New Hampshire students, they receive limited public funding, $9,000 to $10,000 per student, Howard said.
Cornerstone officials have hired an architect and an owner’s representative (a person knowledgeable about construction who oversees a project) and Howard said they hope construction can begin in January. Plans call for four classrooms, a library, a multi-purpose room and administrative offices in a space that’s currently set up as open office space. There are a couple of possible locations for a playground.
Because those plans are unclear, the cost of construction is not yet known, Howard said.
Other structures are already in place, including the organization’s board. In addition to Howard, co-founders include Adam Bristol, who serves as board chairman and is Howard’s husband; Lindsay Wadleigh, a Newport resident who was an elementary music educator in the Hartford School District, and Hollace Bristol, a retired math professor and Adam’s sister. Also among the board’s nine members are Frank Perotti, who has served as a public school administrator in several Upper Valley districts, most recently in Lyme, and Maura Hart, a Plainfield education consultant.
Once it opens, Cornerstone would be the second new school to open in Lebanon in recent years, following New England School of the Arts, an arts focused middle and high school that opened downtown in fall 2024. And it would be the city’s second charter school, after Ledyard Charter School, an alternative high school program founded in 2009.
A recent report from the state Department of Education shows that New Hampshire’s public school enrollment has declined from around 205,000 in 2005-6 to a little over 160,000 today. Howard said she is not concerned about those underlying demographics.
“I don’t worry about that,” she said. “We know that there are, if you look at the statistics … there are a lot of students for whom the traditional school system is not working.”