HOLYOKE — After months of work on securing a new home elsewhere, LightHouse school plans to buy Gateway City Arts in a move that will allow the burgeoning alternative secondary school to meet its growing demand and expand its offerings.

LightHouse Executive Director Catherine Gobron and Lori Divine, co-founder of Gateway City Arts, announced Monday that they have signed a purchase-and-sale agreement for the three-building arts complex at 92 Race St., with closing scheduled for the last week in June.

Gobron said the sale price is $3 million.

The agreement marks a shift in direction for LightHouse, which offers student-centered learning to 75 students in grades 6-12 out of a leased 8,000-square-foot space, also on Race Street.

Last year, the school announced a $4 million plan to buy and renovate the Sons of Zion building at 378 Maple St. Gobron said she worked hard to make that project happen but construction costs kept escalating, to the point that it had turned into a $6 million undertaking.

Leadership of the Jewish congregation was generous in repeatedly extending the closing date, Gobron said, but it became untenable.

“They were wonderful to work with,” she said. “I hated to disappoint them.”

With Gateway City Arts, though, the school, which plans to be in the new space this September, will have a wealth of room in a newly renovated building that will allow it to expand its theater, craft-making and vocational education offerings. Some walls on the second floor will have to be moved and new bathrooms may be needed, Gobron said, but renovation costs won’t come close to what they were at Sons of Zion.

She said the school’s architect, HAI of Northampton, and builders Houle Construction of Ludlow have been “phenomenal” to work with and are on board with the change of plan.

Divine and her husband, Vitek Kruta, opened Gateway City Arts in 2012. The building includes two theaters, a restaurant, a bistro, a gallery and studios. They decided to close in December after years of financial ups and downs and put it up for sale.

“We couldn’t be happier to have LightHouse move into the space that we spent 12 years creating,” Divine said in a statement. “Our mission was always to create a space for education, community, creativity and inspiration.”

Plans for the three-building, 40,000-square-foot facility include a production academy integrated into the two on-site performance spaces, creating opportunities for young people to learn the many skills — lighting, sound, artist management — associated with the entertainment and event production industry.

The aim is for another organization to run the large 500-person concert hall so that it can continue as public venue, Gobron said. The 100-person Divine Theater will be the school’s in-house theater, allowing it to create a theater program.

Similarly, an 8,000-square-foot maker space built by Divine and Kruta, complete with a woodshop and ceramics studio, will continue to host classes and workspaces both for LightHouse students and members of the larger community.

The cafe will be run by an outside organization, as yet unknown, Gobron said. It will be open to the public, and ideally staffed by students.

“We’ll be built-in customers,” she said.

The school will lease out the building’s third floor.

Kruta and Divine said they will back up Gobron and the school any way they can.

“We’ll share our contact information — we have relationships with various walks of life, music, art, education,” Kruta said.

The couple will also help with learning how to maintain the building, no small task.

While Divine and Kruta had received some interest in Gateway City Arts from others, none came as close to fitting their vision of how its spirit would be carried on.

“They’re being wonderful about wanting to honor what we’ve created,” Divine said of LightHouse.

As with its previous plan, the school will finance the acquisition primarily through loans and its capital campaign, which has raised more than $1 million so far, Gobron said. The only money it will lose is a $500,000 grant from MassDevelopment toward the purchase of the Sons of Zion building.

Since the new plan has taken shape, she said, potential partners and investors have been showing up with enthusiasm.

“I feel like I’ve been winding a spring with a lot of force, a lot of effort, and all of a sudden, it’s clicked,” Gobron said. “Things are falling into place.”

When LightHouse officials announced their intention to renovate the Sons of Zion building, school leaders also said they hoped to boost enrollment to more than 100 students.

Started as an idea nine years ago, the school enrolled its first class of 19 students in 2015. LightHouse began a partnership with Holyoke Public Schools in 2017. It enrolls 35 of its students through the public schools in Holyoke, a few from Northampton, Belchertown and Westfield, and many from farther afield who pay private tuition on a sliding scale up to $14,000. Public and private tuition make up approximately 80% of the school’s revenue; the remainder comes through grants and fundraising.

Gobron said the student body at LightHouse is diverse, and the school supports them in becoming self-directed.

“What we do is quite radical — it’s more like college than school,” she said in an interview last year. “It’s quite beautiful, and quite addicting, to watch young people take control of their lives.”

Divine and Kruta said they’re excited to see what LightHouse does in its new home.

“We hope the school is going to get a lot of support,” Kruta said.

James Pentland can be reached at jpentland@gazettenet.com.