HOLYOKE — A secondary school that offers student-centered learning out of a leased space on Race Street has been awarded a $500,000 state grant to buy the Sons of Zion building at 378 Maple St.

The grant, through the Community One Stop for Growth, will assist LightHouse’s $4 million plan to renovate the Jewish congregation’s former home and boost the school’s enrollment to more than 100 students.

The plan is an ambitious one for a school that started as an idea nine years ago and enrolled its first class of 19 students in 2015. LightHouse began a partnership with Holyoke Public Schools in 2017 and now enrolls 75 students in grades 6-12, 35 of them 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.

“We tend to get students who are leaving something that wasn’t working,” said Catherine Gobron, executive director and co-founder of the alternative secondary . “Some have severe life challenges, some have learning challenges. They’re bored, or disengaged.”

She and co-founder Josiah Litant began talking to people in Holyoke about what they wanted in a school right around the time the state took control of the city’s schools. The high school graduation rate at that point was around 50%.

“It was quite lucky for us that receivership came along — everyone wanted to talk about education,” Gobron said. “The receiver had a mandate to stop the dropout tide.”

Typically, when children fail at school, the blame is on the student, she noted. But so many young people in Holyoke were not thriving that officials were forced to re-examine the system.

Gobron was program director for North Star for 12 years, before the self-directed learning center moved from Hadley to Sunderland.

“I originally wanted (LightHouse) to be a second North Star,” she said. North Star “didn’t feel like they could take the risk” of potentially overextending themselves in Holyoke, which she said was perfectly understandable.

North Star does not call itself a school, but people she and Litant had spoken with in Holyoke wanted diplomas, so LightHouse became a school.

“We decided to go for it,” she said. “It’s been an amazing set of miracles.”

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

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

The difference is clear on a visit to LightHouse’s airy 3,500-square-foot space in the Steam Building on Race Street. Students gather in small classes in glassed-in rooms around the periphery or in advisory groups in open spaces. Their open-plan desks are vacant.

Two young pickers are taking instruction on their guitar chops in the music room, and activity can be seen behind the glass of the heavily soundproofed music studio off to the side.

One sixth-grader works intently in a lab room on creating a comic book character’s head on a 3-D printer.

Theanna, a student who graduated last year and came back to teach a class on doulahood, said the school was instrumental in fostering her interest in birth and babies.

“Being here has allowed me to be myself and not feel ashamed of my hobbies and interests,” she said in the school’s Impact Report. “I have learned self-confidence, resilience, self-accountability, and how to stand up for what I believe in.”

The student-staff ratio is about 3-1, Gobron said. There are 12 core staff members, each of whom supervises an advisory group of eight to 12. Adjunct teachers offer specific classes, and the school also works with the five colleges, enlisting students on work-study as tutors, often in math. A handful of students are dual-enrolled at Holyoke Community College.

Many of the students speak Spanish at home. The school works to build partnerships with parents, Gobron said, and holds in-person meetings once a month. Last week’s meeting was held in Spanish.

Litant, who moved west in 2018 but remains connected to the school, was a graduate of Hampshire College, and the Amherst college’s approach of students designing their own curriculum is very much part of LightHouse’s model, Gobron said.

“One student was interested in mortuary work,” she said by way of example. “His adviser got him an internship at a funeral home.”

For LightHouse, good timing came into play again with the sale of the Sons of Zion building.

“We’d been looking for a building,” Gobron said. “We need to be downtown for our students who walk to school.”

The conservative Jewish congregation had gone remote during the pandemic and found it no longer needed its spacious quarters, she said.

LightHouse started working with Mass Development, which was looking for a cornerstone of positive activity in a troubled part of the city, and the school was able secure its new home by outbidding Wendy’s, which wanted to build a drive-thru there.

The purchase price was $835,000. Gobron said the building is generally in good shape, but it needs a lot of updating. The purchase will include four lots, three of them currently vacant. One will be for parking and the school hopes to turn the others into an “urban food forest” for the community.

Gobron is excited about the possibilities.

“LightHouse at Zion is a win for all,” she wrote in a summary of the project. “We will bring an infusion of positive energy into a currently deeply distressed area, creating a cornerstone for additional investment.”

Closing is expected in January, and LightHouse aims to move into its new 4,600-square-foot space in September 2025.

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