Catherine Gobron
I have a sign language turtle who communicates through telepathy.
I should clarify that the turtle is not alive. Nor does it actually know sign language. It is sign language. (One hand over the top of the other becomes the shell, and the wiggling thumb becomes the head.) The telepathy, however, is quite reliable.
The turtle has a few rules. It only says things that are kind, encouraging, hopeful, and true. Beyond that, you can hear whatever you want in your own head. If you hear something unkind, that’s your own story. The turtle would never.
I bring the turtle out for a young person I work with who has a very hard time in the world. Sometimes things are so difficult for her that she thinks she might rather not be in the world at all.
Fortunately, she is still young enough that she can’t always help laughing at ridiculous things.
And for her I am willing to be ridiculous.
This may surprise people who know me. I am not, by nature, an especially silly person. I tend toward seriousness, somewhat unfortunately. I am a hard worker. I take my responsibilities seriously. I have spent much of my life trying to build things, improve things, solve problems, and get things right.
I have high expectations. For myself, for the people I work with, and for the young people we serve.
We have important work to do! There are things to accomplish! Skills to develop! Problems to solve! We have to do a good job! The stakes are high! There’s not enough money! It’s serious! Now! Quick!
Exhausting.
But when I’m with this particular young person, I have to get on the other side of the canoe, or we will surely sink.
She is already hanging off the side of a cliff by her pinky, with a team of mental health professionals at attention. She does not need me standing above her with a clipboard, explaining the importance of developing upper body strength.
She needs something else.
So I make inanimate objects talk to each other. I translate the turtle’s telepathic messages. I engage in extended conversations of absolutely no educational value whatsoever.
Except, of course, that they have enormous educational value.
Because sometimes she laughs. And sometimes the laughter gives her a little room to breathe. And sometimes, riding that wave, she finds her way back into the curiosity and brilliance and playfulness that belong to her, but can sometimes be hard to access.
And sometimes I find my way back to those things, too.
I think a lot about what we owe young people.
At LightHouse, many of the students we work with have had unpleasant experiences in conventional schools. Some have spent years feeling unsuccessful, inadequate, bored, alienated, or simply miserable in places that were supposed to help them learn.
Some are high achievers. But unhappy or unsatisfied. Others arrive with significant academic gaps.
These gaps matter, of course.
We need to understand what young people know and what they don’t know. We need to help them develop literacy, numeracy, critical thinking, and the many other skills that will help them navigate their lives. Assessments can be useful. Academic expectations are important.
I believe all of this.
I also believe that if a young person has spent years learning to hate school, our first move probably shouldn’t be to recreate the experiences that taught them to hate it.
This may seem obvious, written directly like that.
And yet.
We adults are quite good at getting tangled up in our own good intentions. We know young people need skills, so we focus on skills. We know they need to make progress, so we measure progress. We know time is passing, so we become urgent.
Urgency has a way of sucking the fun out of a room.
I know this because I do it myself.
I want things to work. I want our students to succeed. I want us to be excellent at what we do. Sometimes I can feel myself gripping my hopes for our students so tightly that there’s hardly room for anything unexpected to happen.
As though I already know what success looks like. As though the young person’s job is to figure out what answer I’m hoping for and deliver it.
Which is a pretty limited idea of education, when you think about it. And an astonishing amount of confidence in my own ability to predict the future.
Another young person came to us several years ago almost completely shut down.
He was virtually silent and constantly in motion. Connecting with him felt like standing beside a merry-go-round, waving with authentic excitement every time he came around.
Hello! So glad you’re here! And around he’d go again.
Eventually, he began to engage with us, although not always in ways we particularly appreciated. There was a period of truly difficult, destructive behavior. He could be a big jerk.
We kept loving him anyway.
Not because the behavior was acceptable. It wasn’t. Not because we didn’t have expectations. We did.
But because we could see that he was a person worth knowing, even when he was making himself exceptionally difficult to know.
Several years later, he cares about his life. He is a capable young man in the world.
His journey involved considerably less turtle telepathy. None, actually. The turtle would not have gone over well with him. But his journey did require a similar willingness to set aside our preferred timeline and respond to the person who was actually in front of us.
We couldn't demand that he start from somewhere he wasn't.
We can only start where we are. And keep waving.
There's no way to know if it will work. There are so many variables. But with each of these young people, and with all of the young people we serve at LightHouse, we do already know what didn't work. So the only sane option is something different.
There is a difference between having high expectations and holding those expectations too tightly.
We want young people to learn. We want them to grow. We want them to develop skills and confidence and the capacity to make meaningful choices about their lives.
But surely we also want them to surprise us.
To become interested in something we never imagined they’d care about. To discover a talent nobody knew was there. To find their way into learning through a door we hadn’t thought to open.
To do something completely ridiculous that turns out to be wonderful.
Expectations that leave room for discovery, imagination, individuality, and surprise.
High expectations, loosely held.
This is harder than it sounds. Especially when we care a great deal. Especially when the stakes are high. Especially when a young person is struggling and we are frightened for them.
It’s understandable to respond by becoming more serious. More determined. More insistent. But sometimes what a young person needs most is for us to loosen up. And sometimes that’s what we need, too.
I suspect most people who choose to become educators can hear the telepathic turtle.
We enter this work because we see possibility in young people. Because we believe in curiosity and discovery and growth. Because we want to be part of something hopeful.
Then life gets complicated. There are schedules and standards and deadlines and benchmarks and budgets and tests and paperwork and a thousand very real responsibilities. None of these things are inherently bad. Some are essential. But they can become so loud that we forget to listen.
The kid who has something funny to say. The unexpected question. The small moment of connection. The possibility that today might go somewhere entirely different from where we planned.
And the possibility that we might learn something, too.
I don’t want to suggest that silliness is the answer to everything. It isn’t. Some young people need quiet. Some need space. All of them, I think, need us to keep showing up, day after day, while they figure out whether they can trust us.
But I do wonder whether we’ve made the business of growing up, and the business of helping young people grow up, altogether too grim.
The world is a serious place right now. There are plenty of reasons to worry about the future.
All the more reason, perhaps, to make room for delight. For laughter. For curiosity. For the possibility that something wonderful might happen that we couldn’t possibly have planned.
I’m working on this myself. I would like to live a little more loosely. To be less preoccupied with getting everything right. To spend more time enjoying the extraordinary. More time living.
Fortunately, I have some excellent teachers. One of them is a young person who sometimes needs me to be very silly, and one of them is a turtle.
The turtle, incidentally, has extremely high standards. It only says things that are kind, encouraging, hopeful, and true.
But it never insists on the right answer.
There is a question that starts circulating around LightHouse sometime in the late morning: what's for lunch? It's one of the most important questions of the day.
Lunch is cooked from scratch every day in our commerical kitchen, and depending on the day, the answer might be tortilla-crusted tilapia, coconut curry soup, or chicken and sausage gumbo. By noon, most of us are in the Dining Room eating it together.
Most of the people getting it onto the table are students.
Our kitchen is both the place where we make lunch and a working culinary classroom. Students on Lunch Team learn their way around a commercial kitchen, from knife skills and food safety to prep, cooking, sanitation, timing, and working together when eighty hungry people are about to walk through the door. They earn ServSafe certification, and some are already taking what they've learned into paid shifts at events and catering jobs in our own De la Luz venues.
Leading all of this is Sara Barnes, our Director of Culinary & Hospitality, alongside Ricky Montalvo, our Second Chef. Ricky started out washing dishes for us and quickly worked his way into the kitchen, where he is now Sara's teammate in feeding the whole school every day.
Together, Sara and Ricky work with a rotating crew of young people to make lunch happen.
Then everyone shows up to eat what they made.
Sara's route to the LightHouse kitchen was not exactly direct. She originally came to us through De la Luz, where she is our venue chef. If you've eaten at a De la Luz show, you've almost certainly eaten something Sara made. She creates different menus for different events, often playing with the music, the artist, or the culture surrounding a performance.
Last year, when our school chef, Blue, went on paternity leave, Sara stepped in. Blue later decided to stay home with his baby (great call, Blue), so Sara stayed. She is now our daytime and evening chef. She's also teaching biology! More on that in a bit.
I grew up in a large family and I am the oldest of five children. I come from a family that values food and cooking and we would all pitch in to help celebrate holidays, birthdays, or just any special occasion. As a small child I remember standing on a stepstool in my grandmother's kitchen, watching her fry chicken, listening to the sound of chicken skin crackling in the oil, and using the drippings and crispy bits to make a southern style gravy. By the time I was 10 years old I was regularly helping my dad cook dinner for our family using vegetables from our garden or frying up bluegills that we caught on the lake. My dad also apprenticed as a butcher when he was young and so we often butchered our own meats. Initially, I began working in restaurants to help me pay for college, but I was drawn to the different styles of cuisine that I saw different chefs cooking.
I never thought I would become a chef, I always thought that I would be a scientist or a doctor. I went to school to study biochemistry but soon realized that I missed the chaos and camaraderie of the service industry. While I was working in science labs and waiting on experiments to run their course I would often find myself daydreaming about upcoming family gatherings and what fancy things we should cook for our next birthday party or Christmas dinner. When my sister got married she asked me if I could make her wedding cake and help coordinate the event. Several of the guests at her wedding then followed with their own catering requests and I realized that I might be able to turn my hobby into a business.
Cooking for teenagers is its own particular culinary challenge. They have opinions. One of the things we care deeply about at LightHouse is giving young people access to good food: fresh, made here, with a wide range of ingredients, flavors, and cuisines.
Not everyone likes everything. They definitely don't. But every day brings another chance to encounter something new. Because we all eat the same meal together, students see other people eating it, talking about it, going back for seconds, or trying something they might otherwise have passed over. Over time, tastes can change.
I really like to make food approachable and offer multiple different options. I want the kids to try different things and we try to encourage them, even if they don't think they will like it! We do our best to provide a salad bar and fresh fruit every day. On days that we are preparing something a little less approachable (a dish with multiple ingredients like a curry, or gumbo) I like to have some options that are also plain and simple, that I know they will like: roasted potatoes, beans and rice, or garlic bread. No pressure!
Yes, absolutely! Some days we have menus that I know the kids will love, Pizza Bagels, for example. We use day-old bagels from Comfort Bagel but make our own tomato sauce and toppings in house. But some days I like to mix it up and offer a new kind of cuisine, from a different culture. Chicken Tikka Masala, Fried Rice with Dumplings, Posole. I was shocked at how much they loved the Posole, a Mexican soup made with hominy and chipotle peppers.
The kids were definitely reluctant to try the fish, a tortilla-crusted tilapia that I thought was delicious. We accommodate all different diets, vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, etc. I have been surprised at how many kids will ask to try the tofu dish or the gluten free dish. I feel like now that they know the food is going to be well prepared and tasty they are more curious about trying what we make.
Lunch Team students come in with very different levels of experience. Some are already comfortable in a kitchen. Some aren't. They learn by doing the actual work of feeding the school: knife skills, food preparation, commercial equipment, sanitation, timing, teamwork, and eventually taking responsibility for pieces of a meal.
They also earn ServSafe certification. For students interested in culinary or hospitality work, these aren't pretend workplace skills. They're learning in a working commercial kitchen, and some are already moving from Lunch Team into paid catering and event shifts at De la Luz, our onsite performing arts venue.
For students who never intend to work in a kitchen, knowing how to handle food safely, turn fresh ingredients into a meal, and feed yourself and other people are pretty useful skills to carry into adulthood.
Safety. On the first day of class we go over the kitchen rules. And we continue to reinforce these rules throughout the semester. If kids aren't paying attention they could actually get hurt. I don’t just go through a list of rules, we also talk about WHY these rules are in place. For example, no headphones. You have to be able to hear if someone is walking behind you and coming through with a big pot of hot water. You have to be aware of your surroundings and move out of the way so you don’t get burned.
Keep it clean! Whatever you are cooking, you want your space to be clean and the ingredients to be as fresh as possible. I just want them to be safe!
Lunch has one feature that sets it apart from most school assignments: it has to come out on time. There is no extension until Monday. If something goes wrong at 11:40, eighty-ish hungry people are still going to appear at noon, and those people are your friends, your teachers, and the people you spend every day with.
We pivot. You have to be flexible and be able to change the plan. I try very hard to stay ahead of the game but sometimes disasters happen. I usually have a backup plan, some homemade soups in the freezer, some bread we can pull out and turn into a grilled cheese sandwich or garlic bread, some chicken we can grill off quickly for grilled chicken salads. The last 20 minutes of lunch prep are always all hands on deck!
Yes, absolutely! I have found that the majority of students who sign up for Lunch Team become awesome team players once they know what is expected of them. The kitchen is a great space for students who have trouble sitting still for lecture-based coursework. I also think that they are able to take pride in their work because they see the immediate impacts of their labor. I think that working in the kitchen gives them a tangible and immediate opportunity for feedback, for example, if a student completes a specific dish, the garlic bread or the guacamole, and other students enjoy it, they see immediately that their contribution is necessary and valuable. Some of our current Lunch Team students are now helping me with paid events and catering and they are very knowledgeable and professional.
Then there is the slightly improbable fact that the person making lunch is also teaching biology. Sara has a background in science, and this year she brought that part of herself to LightHouse too. The combination makes more sense than it may sound.
Yes to both questions. I think of myself as a scientist first and foremost, but I suppose that I am just interested in learning more about how things work. I ran a lab for many years before I embarked on my current culinary journey and the two jobs are remarkably similar. There is equipment that needs to function and be repaired, there are creative and intelligent people that you need to work with, and ultimately, every time we cook something it is an experiment. We bring ingredients into the space, we apply heat, acid, and pressure; we use mathematics daily and then we see what comes out of the other end of those equations. Cooking is the ultimate fusion of physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics and art.
Life often has rhythms that become so ordinary to the people inside them that you stop noticing how special they are. Lunch is one of ours. Someone starts cooking in the morning. Students come in and out of the kitchen. Things get chopped and roasted and stirred. Someone tries something they've never eaten before. Someone learns to make something they may still be making for themselves twenty years from now. Then, at noon, the work disappears onto plates and we sit down together as a community, frequently with guests.
Lunch is one of the few times each day when nearly everyone at LightHouse stops what they're doing and gathers in the same room. Youth and adults eat the same food at the same tables. There is conversation and noise, and many come back for seconds.
I hope that students feel the humanity in the experience. We are living in an unprecedented time. Technology is moving so quickly. It is so easy to sit at home, alone, on your computer and feel like you are connecting with people when, in reality, you are so isolated. Sitting down and eating a meal together is so important for our connection. We are not machines, we are human. We may be having a good day or a bad day but I think that taking the time to share a meal together is something that connects us with each other and hopefully allows us to see each other, and just be present for each other.
And the next morning, Sara, Ricky, and Lunch Team start all over again. Thank you!
For generations, we have offered young people a deal.
Go to school. Work hard. Learn what you're taught. Earn the credits. Get the diploma. Maybe get another diploma after that. Education is the way out: out of poverty and instability, into economic security and opportunity.
For some people, that promise has been profoundly true. Education and earnings remain strongly related.
In 1848, Horace Mann, the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, called education "a great equalizer of the conditions of men." Our culture continues to hold this belief like scripture.
But the record says otherwise.
Children don't enter school equally resourced. Some arrive with financial security, stable housing, extensive networks, tutors, travel, enrichment, and parents who know how to navigate powerful institutions. Others don't.
And the system often widens those differences. Districts serving mostly students of color receive $23 billion less each year than districts serving mostly white students. At the top, children from the richest 1% of families are twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as middle-class students with the same test scores.
School is far better at reproducing inequality than disrupting it. For all our talk of equalizing, the system does not seem to be designed for this goal.
Extraordinary educators have spent generations trying to make school more humane, equitable, engaging, and effective, and they have changed countless lives. Despite all that talent, commitment, and effort, the patterns persist.
When that much talent keeps running into the same wall, maybe the problem is the wall.
Academic learning matters. Literacy matters. Math matters. Knowledge matters. Strong teachers measurably affect students' later college attendance and earnings.
But when researchers follow young people into adulthood, the picture gets much bigger than the transcript.
Where children grow up changes their economic trajectories. Relationships across socioeconomic lines are strongly associated with upward mobility. And in a randomized study of Career Academies, young people who experienced academics alongside employer connections and work-based learning earned more years later, even though they weren't substantially more likely to earn postsecondary credentials.
Something valuable happened that wasn't captured by another diploma.
Across the research, the picture looks less like a curriculum and more like an ecosystem: knowledge, relationships, supportive adults, meaningful work, real responsibility, exposure to opportunity, and connections to worlds young people might otherwise never enter.
They don't choose between academics and access. They provide both.
Many families can't. Yet the credential is what opens doors, and everything that helped earn it stays invisible. That's one of the ways the status quo reproduces itself. Everyone deserves the whole package.
Read this. Write this. Remember this. Solve this. Answer these questions. Accumulate enough successful performances and we award credits. Accumulate enough credits and we award a diploma.
A traditional transcript tells us remarkably little about whether you can organize a complicated project, manage money, resolve a conflict, teach yourself something, work with someone very different from you, build relationships with people who know things you don't, or turn an idea into something another human being actually values.
It doesn't tell us who knows you, where you've been, or whether anyone outside school has ever depended on you to do something that mattered. Maybe we've mistaken the evidence of learning for the purpose of learning.
AI is making that mistake harder to ignore. Machines are increasingly capable of producing many of the artifacts we use as evidence of learning: the essay, the report, the answer, the code.
Knowledge still matters. What rises in value is everything that remains deeply human: curiosity, judgment, empathy, imagination, and the ability to build trust and make something happen with other people.
We have been testing this approach since 2015 at LightHouse Holyoke. We certainly haven't figured it all out. But we know that the conventional boundaries of school should not be the boundaries of education.
Literacy and numbers, science, history, culture, art, and government stay essential. Young people need knowledge to understand the world, and no one can judge what an AI hands them without knowing a great deal already.
But don't stop there.
Can you understand money and a contract? Use AI without surrendering your judgment to it? Distinguish evidence from propaganda? Make something another person values? Organize people and resources around an idea? Communicate across culture, class, identity, and perspective?
Can you enter an unfamiliar environment and figure out how it works? Build relationships with people who know things you don't? Become someone other people can depend on?
Can you learn something nobody has assigned?
Relationships matter, so we build relationships. Access matters, so we create access. Meaningful work matters, so we make it part of learning. Knowing how to navigate institutions matters, so we teach it. Adults outside school matter, so we bring them in.
None of this requires abandoning rigor. It requires getting much more honest about what "rigor" should include.
Above all, young people need the chance to discover, while they are still young, that they can do something useful in the world.
The best preparation for a meaningful and productive future is a meaningful and productive present.
We have spent generations telling young people that education is the way out. But a way out assumes that escape is the best option, and that school holds the door.
What if, instead, we built a way in?
A way into the work, relationships, and rooms that shape adult life, for young people with something to offer, not something to escape. It begins with what they already bring: their gifts, interests, identities, and ideas. A way in surrounds them with people, experiences, support, and opportunities to turn those things into something real.
A way in also means investing in our communities, so young people have reasons to stay and the tools to make those places better.
That work belongs to all of us: educators, employers, artists, neighbors, elders, institutions. Education doesn't have to be something young people complete before they're allowed into the world.
And a credential doesn't have to decide who gets the chance.
Let's build the way in.
More than a decade ago, Aitabé Fornés left her job teaching high school science in New York City to follow another path.
This fall, she returns to the classroom as LightHouse's new 10th grade advisor. Our competency-based model is built around individualized learning—one of the things that drew her back to school. She brings years of classroom experience, along with fourteen years spent exploring Family Constellations, somatic listening, coaching, and an approach she developed called Sensethinking.
Her work asks people to pay attention to what is happening beneath the surface: in relationships, in patterns, in the body, and in the stories we carry about ourselves and one another.
I have been fortunate to work at innovative high schools for my whole career, starting way back in 2000. But in 2012, I had reached an impasse: I was teaching at a new school where, despite the hard work and good intentions of the faculty and staff, the individualized needs of the students were at conflict with the inflexible demands of the larger school system. It taught me that even the best teachers are limited by the system.
This is one of the things I recognized right away about LightHouse - that the structure of the school is organized around the priority of individualized learning.
Aitabé describes herself as a teacher at heart, even in the years her work took her far from the classroom.
Though I stepped away from classroom teaching in 2012, I did not walk away from education. I discovered the practice of Family Constellations, a powerful healing modality that incorporates somatic practices with knowledge of family systems, and immersed myself in it. I was struck by how much insight and understanding becomes available to people when they combine thoughtful inquiry with body-centered sensing. This inspired the pedagogical approach that I developed called Sensethinking.
So what does that look like in practice?
Here’s a simple way to understand Sensethinking: If I ask my students to read a story that involves a conflict between two characters, we are typically reading, writing, and thinking about the story. But if we pause and draw a picture of the two characters and how we imagine them to feel about each other, that drawing literally creates a new perspective on the reading.
It is activating the senses by bringing in new visual elements, such as size and distance, as well as more spontaneous elements, such as how the reader imagines the emotions the characters are feeling.This practice generates new ideas and creates a more dynamic, sensing + thinking experience.
Adults can be quick to interpret teenagers, especially when they aren't following the plan we've asked of them. We call them unmotivated. Defiant. Distracted. Anxious. Disengaged. Too much. Not enough.
But behavior is information, not the whole story.
At LightHouse, advising begins with curiosity about the person underneath the most visible behavior.
Honestly, first, I check in with myself. Am I feeling calm and well-resourced, or tired and stressed? If I’m tired and stressed, I give myself a moment to breathe and make sure I can be fully present to the young person in front of me.
Teens want what we all want: connection. When I am calm, present, and open, I am available for connection and support.
Advisors at LightHouse help young people navigate our competency-based program toward graduation. But they are also often the adults outside a teen's family who know them best over time—helping them understand where they are, what they need, what may be getting in the way, and where they want to go next.
That takes balance. Young people need freedom without neglect and support without constant direction. They need adults who hold high expectations without reducing those expectations to compliance.
Aitabé's work also asks us to see a young person in context—not as an isolated set of behaviors, strengths, or needs, but as someone shaped by relationships and by the larger systems to which they belong.
Our lives and our student’s lives are part of an interconnected web comprising all of the systems we belong to. While there is much to be critical of about the larger social, economic, and political systems, my work with systems actually helps me feel quite positive and optimistic because I have seen repeatedly that systems have an organizing impulse to move into greater health and wholeness.
One way that can happen is when a dysregulated young person meets an adult with a calm, regulated nervous system. It doesn’t mean that the young person instantly becomes calm! But it does create a culture where they can feel that they are safe, they belong, and they matter.
Aitabé comes back to school understanding education as deeply relational. Young people need adults who teach and challenge them, but also listen closely, notice patterns, ask meaningful questions, and stay alongside them as they figure out who they are becoming.
At LightHouse, we talk often about young people developing vision and agency. No one can hand those things to them. They emerge through experience, reflection, relationships, experimentation, mistakes, interests, questions, and time.
Our job is to create the conditions: safety and belonging, clear expectations, meaningful challenge, real responsibility, and adults who remain curious about the person underneath the behavior—and about who that person might be becoming.
I am most excited to introduce students to the breadth of their intelligence. Once a learner expands how they know by including all of their senses, they will feel like they have a sense-thinking super power!
Aitabé left the classroom to learn more about people. Fourteen years later, she is bringing what she learned back to school.
We are very glad she chose LightHouse.
Last night, we gathered around the Long Table for a conversation called Understanding the Data Center Dilemma.
If we had to sum up our vision at LightHouse/LightWorks in one sentence, it would be this: create places where people learn with each other, from each other, and for each other. The Long Table is one expression of that vision.
Doesn't that sound lovely?
It is.
It's also really hard.
Learning with other people means eventually getting into something we don't agree about. It means listening when we would rather respond, asking questions when we feel certain, and staying curious when something makes us uncomfortable. It means trying to understand another person without making agreement the price of staying in the conversation.
That's one reason AI is such a useful topic.
It is divisive. We love that.
Division isn't the goal, of course. Disagreement gives us something to practice. We got some practice last night!
We've talked around this table about AI and education, loneliness, careers in a changing world, and other subjects that touch people pretty personally. Somehow data centers managed to make our evening about The Loneliness Epidemic look comparatively cheerful 🙂
But difficult was part of the point.
We like to begin these dinners with a question that invites a little vulnerability and gives us a glimpse of one another as people. The goal is simple: before we take positions or make arguments, we remember that we are people sitting around a table together.
We go around with a two-minute sand timer, and everyone gets a chance to answer.
Last night I asked:
What is the first thing you remember worrying about in the larger world?
People remembered Vietnam. Having a draft number. AIDS. Climate change. Hell, as Christianity had taught it.
Several people reflected on childhoods that were well shielded from the realities of the larger world. One person talked about having so many immediate dangers and challenges in everyday life that there simply wasn't any room to worry about problems beyond the doorstep.
It was a remarkable little map of the room: different generations, different fears, and very different relationships to power, safety, institutions, technology, and the future.
Then we got into it.
People came with real concerns, and some real anger. There was a strong feeling of being steamrolled by greed: that decisions with enormous consequences are being made by corporations with far more power than the communities that will live with those consequences. That the public good is not driving the decisions. That something increasingly fundamental to modern life is being built out around us with little meaningful public say in how it should work.
That led us to a question I'm still thinking about:
If computing infrastructure is becoming as essential to modern life as electricity, should we be thinking about it more like a public utility?
We talked about power. Water. Corporate profit. Public infrastructure. Who gets to decide. Who benefits. Who bears the risk.
Because we were sitting in Holyoke, none of this was theoretical. We talked at length about the city's recent decision to ban new data centers, and several people who had been directly involved in that process were at the table. I learned a lot.
The conversation was not easy. The concerns in the room were real, and people were ready to name them. It became harder when the picture got more complicated.
Data centers are not all the same. They don't all use water the same way or consume the same amount of electricity. What they're doing, how they're cooled, where their energy comes from, and what infrastructure already exists around them all matter. Furthermore, we are all using technology that uses data centers to some degree, and becoming increasingly reliant, whether we are aware or actively using AI tools or not.
The more closely you look, the harder it becomes to fit the whole question into a clean story.
Earlier in the evening, we had talked about how much our current information environment pushes us toward outrage, certainty, and simplified narratives.
Then we got to experience firsthand how hard it is to resist that pull.
I felt it too. That may have been the most interesting part of the night. It was also where I was most impressed by the people around the table.
There were tense moments. There were strong feelings, all from a place of care about our world and our shared future. People stayed through it, and stayed kind.
We called the gathering Understanding the Data Center Dilemma because understanding is work. It takes time. It asks us to remain engaged when the subject gets complicated and when the people around us don't see it exactly as we do.
We did not leave with a clear, shared position on data centers. We left knowing a little more about the issue and a little more about one another. That feels worth celebrating.
We cannot affect what we do not understand. Learning how to understand complicated and emotionally loaded things together may be one of the most important human skills we can practice right now.
We are grateful to everyone willing to gather around the table with us! Our next Long Table gathering will be on October, 14, The Minds We’ll Need Next: Neurodivergence in the Age of AI. Love for you to join us to discuss whether neurodivergence might be a super power in our new world.
A diverse learning community puts us in daily contact with others unlike ourselves.
Different backgrounds. Different experiences. Different strengths. Different assumptions. Different ways of seeing the world.
Our young people are heading into a world that will ask them to communicate and collaborate across culture, class, identity, experience, expertise, belief, and perspective. School should give them practice doing that now.
Diversity is hard.
“Rigor” is a buzzword in education, and it usually refers to how challenging it is to absorb information and share it back. Is community rigorous? It sure is hard. We believe that the opportunity and expectation to develop interpersonal skills across difference should be a hallmark of a rigorous education.
It is at LightHouse. We are a competency-based program. Empathy, Effective Communication, and Collaboration are all foundational graduation requirements here.
Communication comes easily when everyone shares the same references, expectations, and language. Understanding someone whose experience differs from yours takes effort, and that effort is where the learning happens.
When people with different assumptions spend their days together, they misread one another, disagree, and sometimes hurt each other’s feelings. Even in relationships without significant differences, conflict is part of life. We think it’s essential for young people to learn how to hold and communicate their feelings with respect and care, and to learn how to listen and appreciate the perspective of others.
Carlos “Rec” McBride leads that work as our Director of Restorative Culture and Belonging. Rec brings more than 15 years of experience in education, community work, and creative media, including teaching at Hampshire College, Smith College, Holyoke Community College, and the High School of Commerce. Across his work with young people and adults, his focus has been equity, self-empowerment, healing, and helping people understand one another across difference.
At LightHouse, Rec helps build the practices that strengthen our community every day and leads the work of repair when something breaks.
His approach begins with curiosity.
What happened?
What was going on for you?
Who was affected?
What needs to happen to make it right?
This work is deeply relational. It requires trust, safety, and time.
It looks like a student saying out loud what they have never been able to say to anyone at school. It looks like someone who caused harm hearing how it landed and staying in the room. It looks like vulnerability, met with understanding and connection.
It also means adults taking responsibility for their own impact, in how they treat one another and how they treat young people. Adults set the example for what cooperation, care, and respect look like.
A lot of healing happens in these rooms.
“Whenever there is a situation that involves tension or conflict I consider the importance of being present and clear so that I can adequately facilitate a meaningful dialogue that is grounded in respect, deep understanding, and a safe space that fosters agency.”
“The goal is never a quick fix but rather the process of cultivating a meaningful conversation that supports growth, healing and self awareness.”
— Carlos “Rec” McBride, Director of Restorative Culture and Belonging
There is good reason to invest in this work.
Research has repeatedly challenged the idea that punishment and exclusion make schools safer. The American Psychological Association’s Zero Tolerance Task Force found little evidence that punitive, exclusionary approaches improve behavior or school safety.
In a randomized trial in Pittsburgh Public Schools, suspension days fell 36 percent in schools using restorative practices, compared with 18 percent in control schools.
Belonging matters too. In the CDC’s 2021 survey of more than 17,000 high school students, those who felt that adults and peers cared about them reported much lower rates of poor mental health, and a meta-analysis of 82 studies links school belonging to stronger engagement, achievement, and attendance.
This kind of change takes time, often three to five years.
So we invest in relationship, and we stay with it.
Belonging across difference is a skill, and people build it through practice.
We need practice playing with others.
Young people need chances to listen closely, ask better questions, explain themselves, reconsider assumptions, disagree without dismissing each other, repair misunderstandings, and find a way to work together anyway.
Putting different people in the same room does not produce any of this on its own. It grows in a community where people know one another, depend on one another, make things together, and trust each other enough to stay in relationship when things get complicated.
That is part of what school can be.
Young people develop through experience. We can learn about diversity as a concept, but we learn to navigate difference by doing it.
A strong community is one where people who differ learn how to belong together.
Los Angeles Unified has imposed a districtwide moratorium on student use of generative AI on district devices for the current school year. All grades.
I understand the concern. Everyone is talking about it. We can’t not. The New York Times features an article this week about a new report from MIT suggesting that AI is causing “cognitive surrender” in college students, as well.
It’s clear that AI makes it extraordinarily easy for a student to produce work they did not actually do. It can write the paper, summarize the reading, answer the questions, and create a polished presentation in seconds.
We need to be worried about what happens when young people routinely outsource the thinking they need to learn to do themselves.
But banning AI will not solve the cheating problem. Cheating is a predictable response to an educational system that too often prioritizes compliance and completion over relevance, agency, and meaningful engagement.
Denise Pope and Victor Lee at Stanford's Graduate School of Education have tracked academic integrity for more than 15 years. Their surveys found that 60 to 70 percent of students were already engaging in at least one form of cheating in a typical month, long before generative AI existed. When they surveyed again in 2023, after ChatGPT arrived, that rate stayed about the same, or dropped slightly.
AI changed the speed at which one could fake learning. It did not create the behavior.
The more important question is why so many students were already looking for ways around the work.
Pope and Lee point to familiar reasons: too much homework, not enough time, pressure to get good grades, and assignments that feel like meaningless busywork. They also found students are less likely to cheat when they feel respected, connected, and engaged in work that has a real purpose.
So yes, we should protect young people from letting AI replace the struggle through which learning happens. But if our response is limited to blocking a tool, we've missed the larger problem. Students were phoning in schoolwork long before AI made it easy.
Conventional schooling asks young people to comply first and care later. Complete the task because it was assigned. Learn this because it's on the test. Move at this pace because everyone else is moving at this pace.
That approach may produce completed assignments. It does not reliably produce curiosity, ownership, or deep learning, and in fact, undermines them.
What excites me about this moment is what it's forcing into the open: producing an assignment has never been the same thing as learning. Real engagement is hard to manufacture around work that feels arbitrary, disconnected from a student's interests, or irrelevant to anything they care about, and no ban fixes that.
At LightHouse, we are choosing intentional use over a ban. We have built AI into our new school operating system in a way that is optional, transparent, and visible to staff. We are rolling it out slowly and with care. Students may eventually choose to work with an AI agent inside our system, but those conversations are logged rather than private, and the system can flag language that may require adult attention.
The goal is to make the useful parts of AI available without allowing the tool to quietly become a therapist, confidant, or substitute for adult support.
We approach the question of whether and when to use AI through what is sometimes referred to as backward design: start with the learning goal, then work backward to the experiences and evidence that will help a student reach it. What should this student come to understand? What should they be able to do? What capacities are they trying to develop? Only then do we ask what role AI should play in the process.
Sometimes AI can help a student generate possibilities, get unstuck, receive feedback, organize information, or pursue a question further. Other times the struggle is the point. If a student needs to develop their own argument, wrestle with uncertainty, learn to write clearly, solve a problem, collaborate with another person, or discover what they actually think, handing that work to AI defeats the purpose.
That determination will not always be the same for every assignment or for every student. In a personalized, competency-based learning environment, it doesn't have to be.
AI Fluency is now one of the competencies we teach, and it becomes a graduation requirement beginning in 2028. Knowing how to use AI matters. Knowing when not to use it may matter just as much.
At LightHouse, we start from a different place. We get to know our students well, collaborate with them on choosing and developing work that feels interesting and relevant, and give them real choices in how they do it. We build the relationships and support that make hard things possible.
AI makes it easier than ever to fake compliance. It also makes it harder to pretend compliance was ever the same thing as learning, and that's the discussion worth having.
Learn more about the LightHouse approach to AI >>
Your teenager hates school.
Maybe every morning is a battle. It’s the beginning of the school year. Maybe there was hope that this year would be different, but now just a few weeks in, the familiar and pervasive desire to not be there has returned.
Or maybe they go willingly and dutifully. They get up. They go. They do the work. They get decent grades. Everyone tells you they are “doing well.”
But they are miserable.
At some point, it is worth asking a question our culture rarely asks:
Why do we believe succeeding in school is worth so much suffering?
Sometimes the answer is college. Families worry that leaving a conventional school path will close doors.
But in fact, colleges, including highly selective ones, care about what a young person has actually done, learned, and accomplished. Where and how they did that can either blend into a sea of similar transcripts or help tell a distinctive story. LightHouse graduates from 2026 are now at Smith College, Simmons University, and Whitman, among others. 2025 graduates are at UMass Amherst, UConn, UVM, and Wheaton, among others. One LightHouse graduate is now at Columbia Law School. Another is at Skidmore with an internship at NASA. Elite options are very much open to graduates from nontraditional schools.
But the bigger point is not admissions.
For a young person who is miserable in school, finding another way can mean getting their life back. For someone who cannot wait for high school to end, a different educational experience may be exactly what makes further learning feel possible.
When a teenager is unhappy in almost any other part of life, we are willing to examine the environment.
An activity you once loved but now dread? Maybe it isn't right for you anymore.
A relationship that makes you miserable? Something needs to change.
But school is different.
When a young person says, over and over, I hate this place, our first response is often to figure out how to make them tolerate it better.
Get them up earlier. Take away the phone. Hire a tutor. Create a reward system. Take away privileges. Get stricter about attendance. Teach them better executive-functioning skills. Treat the anxiety.
Sometimes those things are helpful and the school experience improves.
But sometimes we are working incredibly hard to help a young person adapt to an environment that just isn't working for them. Why?
Our cultural belief is that young people must complete a conventional schooling experience in order to go on to a successful life, whether the next step is college, training, or work.
That is simply not true.
Stepping off the beaten path is not the same as launching into an uncharted wilderness. There are many well-established ways to learn, graduate, build skills, enter college, train for a career, and create a meaningful adult life.
Conventional school is one path.
It is not the only path.
This gets even harder when the young person is technically succeeding. We have met plenty of young people who arrived at LightHouse with good grades.
They knew how to complete assignments. They knew what teachers wanted. They knew how to study for tests, accumulate credits, follow directions, and produce the right thing by the deadline.
They had learned how to do school, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were curious.
It doesn't mean they knew what they cared about. It doesn't mean they felt known. It doesn't mean they were developing judgment, independence, confidence, creativity, or a sense of purpose.
And it certainly doesn't mean they were happy.
Yet as a culture, we are extraordinarily reluctant to interfere with a student who is “doing well.”
What if doing well in school and doing well as a human being are not the same thing?
This is where many families get stuck.
Changing schools, or even seriously questioning the school experience, can feel reckless.
What about college?
What about a diploma?
What about their future?
What if we let them leave something difficult and they never learn perseverance?
Those are reasonable fears. We have built an entire culture around a particular sequence:
Go to school.
Get good grades.
Graduate.
Go to college.
Get a good job.
Have a good life.
It is such a familiar sequence that we can stop noticing that these are actually separate things.
School is one way of getting an education.
Grades are one way of documenting learning.
College is one possible next step.
A job is not the same thing as a meaningful life.
Suffering through an environment that leaves you anxious, detached, exhausted, or hopeless is not automatically character building. It can do real damage to a young person’s sense of self-worth and hope for the future.
Young people are especially vulnerable to the messages their environments send them. If school repeatedly tells them, directly or indirectly, that something is wrong with the way their brain works, the way they look, the way they move through the world, or the things they care about, they will believe it.
That can be deeply internalized.
Long after they leave school, they may still be trying to unlearn the idea that they were the problem.
Sometimes perseverance means staying.
Sometimes it means having the courage to change direction.
Believe that the statement contains information.
Not necessarily a final verdict. Not necessarily an instruction to withdraw them tomorrow.
But information.
Get curious about what isn't working.
Is your child bored?
Overwhelmed?
Lonely?
Doing work that feels meaningless?
Struggling to keep pace?
Moving far faster than the class?
Masking all day?
Feeling like nobody at school really knows them?
Have they stopped seeing any relationship between what they do all day and the person they hope to become?
And then ask a harder question:
If nothing changed, would I be comfortable asking my child to live this way for another year?
Two years?
Four?
A different school will not magically solve every problem.
Young people still need challenge. They need accountability. They need to develop perseverance. They need to learn how to do things they don't particularly feel like doing.
But challenge and misery are not the same thing.
Accountability and obedience are not the same thing.
Learning and schoolwork are not the same thing.
At LightHouse, we believe the best preparation for a meaningful and productive future is a meaningful and productive present.
That means young people should have opportunities now to discover what interests them, do work that matters, build real relationships, make meaningful choices, struggle with difficult things, contribute to a community, and develop an increasingly clear sense of who they are and what they want to do with their lives.
Not someday.
Now.
For families whose teenagers are disengaged, avoiding school, burned out, anxious, chronically absent—or simply going every day and becoming more miserable—we've put together a place to start.
You do not have to assume that the only option is figuring out how to make your child tolerate school better.
Learn more about school disengagement and what other options can look like →
AI is making it much easier for students to produce polished work without doing much learning.
That is a problem. It is also clarifying something schools should have confronted a long time ago: the product was never the point.
New York City's new AI policy draws a line: elementary and middle school students face broad restrictions, while high school students will be allowed more limited use.
This distinction makes sense. Mostly.
For me, a more ideal scenario would allow middle school students to begin developing AI fluency in a controlled space with clear guardrails. At LightHouse, we have recently built a custom platform for exactly this purpose.
The dangers NYC is trying to protect against are real. Young people need time to develop foundational skills, sustained attention, independent thought, creativity, social connection, frustration tolerance, and confidence in their own ability to solve problems.
If AI steps in too early or too often, it can short-circuit exactly the struggle through which those capacities are built. A 2023 study, “Impact of AI Assistance on Student Agency,” of more than 1,600 students across 10 courses found that students tended to rely on AI-assisted feedback rather than learn from it, and when the AI assistance was removed, the knowledge didn’t hold.
As it turns out, productive struggle is a necessary feature of deep learning.
But a blanket ban creates a different problem.
AI is rapidly becoming part of how people write, research, design, code, analyze, create, and communicate. Students need opportunities to develop fluency with these tools before they enter adulthood.
The challenge is to help them use AI without letting it bypass the work that is necessary to building true understanding and real skills.
Young people (and all people!) need to understand what AI does well and where it fails.
We need to know how to question its outputs, recognize hallucinations and bias, verify information, protect privacy, and remember that a confident answer can still be wrong.
But AI fluency is not just knowing how to use the tool. It is also knowing when not to.
The question worth asking is:
What are we actually asking the student to learn?
If the goal is to learn how to construct an argument, having AI construct the argument defeats the point.
If the goal is to develop as a writer, to find language, structure ideas, revise, and make meaning, then some of the struggle is the learning.
Other times, using AI may be completely appropriate. A student might use it to compare approaches, troubleshoot, translate, generate possibilities, interrogate an idea, or extend an ambitious project.
The issue is not simply whether AI touched the work. The issue is what intellectual work the student actually did.
AI fluency means learning how to use a powerful tool without handing over judgment, curiosity, creativity, or responsibility. It means knowing when AI supports the learning, and when it replaces the very thing you are trying to learn.
You can watch someone else do sit-ups all day. Your own abs will remain entirely unimpressed.
As AI makes finished products easier to generate, we need to become more interested in the purpose and personal investment behind the work.
Instead of simply asking whether a student completed the assignment, we can ask:
What are you trying to understand?
What choices did you make?
What can you do now that you could not do before?
Those questions tell us much more about whether learning actually happened.
Because the real measure of learning is not the product AI helped produce.
It is what the student can now do, understand, or create without it.
At LightHouse, we see it constantly: people work harder, think more deeply, and persist longer when they want to, when the work has real meaning for them.
Meaningful work is often the hardest kind.
Learning to write something powerful, understand a problem, build something, produce a live show, conduct research, repair a bike, master a technical skill, or create something that did not exist before can be deeply demanding.
The difference is that there is a reason to do the difficult thing.
There is a question the learner cares about. A skill they want. A problem they are trying to solve. Something they want to make. Someone they want to become.
That matters enormously in the age of AI.
None of this is new. Work that does not matter to the student has never produced much real learning. People have always found ways around it by copying, cramming and forgetting, or simply doing the minimum to get by.
What is different now is how easy the workaround has become.
A student who once had to at least go through the motions can now produce a finished, polished product in seconds, with none of the thinking behind it.
AI has made phoning in meaningless work fast, convincing, and nearly effortless, and this is exposing something important.
AI did not create the problem of meaningless schoolwork. It made the problem impossible to ignore.
If the product can be generated in seconds, what was the learning actually for?
Banning AI for younger children makes sense to me in many contexts. It is a powerful and potentially dangerous tool, including in its capacity to flatten creativity, replace struggle, and interrupt the development of independent thinking.
But at some point, young people have to learn to work with it, or risk being used by it. We owe students the chance to learn how to use AI well and safely.
We also owe them something harder: work worth doing, even when a shortcut is available.
What excites me is that AI is forcing us to stop confusing the production of assignments with learning. We have to ask harder questions and create space for young people to struggle with their answers:
What do you care about?
What do you want to understand, solve, make, or become able to do?
What is getting in your way, and what kind of help would actually help?
Those are the questions LightHouse has been built around from the beginning.
We believe school should help young people become more capable, more curious, more connected, and more able to do meaningful work in the world.
AI does not change that mission. It makes it more urgent.
There is plenty to worry about in this new era of artificial intelligence.
The pace of change is extraordinary. Tools that barely existed a few years ago can now write essays, generate images, compose music, produce code, summarize research, solve problems, and retrieve enormous amounts of information almost instantly.
There are real questions here about misinformation, displacement, privacy, bias, intellectual property, environmental impact, and what happens when we outsource more and more of our thinking to machines.
We need to take that seriously.
And.
There is also something about this moment that feels deeply affirming.
If machines can do more, what becomes more human?
In a recent video about education in the age of AI, Dr. Marcus Fontoura makes a simple argument: if machines can increasingly handle memorization, information retrieval, routine procedures, and even many of the tasks we have historically used to measure academic success, then the purpose of education has to shift.
What becomes more important is our ability to become more fully human.
To be curious. To ask good questions. To decide what matters. To make meaning. To pursue work that is personally meaningful and genuinely interesting. To communicate clearly. To collaborate with other people, including people who think, live, communicate, or experience the world differently than we do. To try things we do not already know how to do. To fail, reconsider, adapt, and try again.
LightHouse was founded more than a decade ago on the premise that education should be about much more than accumulating information, earning grades, and demonstrating that you can follow instructions.
We did not know ChatGPT was coming. What we did know was that the world young people were entering would keep changing — that nobody could reliably predict which specific facts, technologies, jobs, or technical skills would matter twenty years later, and that preparing young people for that world couldn't mean simply filling them with as much information as possible.
So we built around something else.
We built around agency.
Around helping young people discover what interests them and why. Around giving them opportunities to make choices and then live with those choices. Around learning through projects, relationships, experimentation, reflection, and real work. Around developing the ability to communicate, collaborate, problem-solve, advocate, create, persist, and change course.
Knowledge still matters enormously.
You cannot ask particularly good questions about something you know nothing about. Creativity depends on having things to connect. Expertise still requires sustained study, practice, mentorship, and experience.
But knowledge is the foundation, not the finish line.
The goal is becoming someone who knows how to keep learning — not accumulating a fixed inventory of information that will somehow carry you through the next fifty years.
That means developing curiosity rather than extinguishing it.
It means having enough confidence to attempt something difficult and enough humility to realize when you are wrong.
It means learning from teachers, as well as mentors, peers, colleagues, craftspeople, artists, employers, community members, and experience itself. In the real world.
And increasingly, it means learning how to use extraordinarily powerful machines without allowing those machines to determine what is worth doing.
This has sometimes made LightHouse look unusual compared with traditional schools. In the age of AI, it looks increasingly practical.
The technology has changed dramatically.
The reason for the work has only become clearer.
What happens when the path you thought you were on disappears?
That was the question we brought to the Long Table on August 5. Around the table that evening were people from different generations, professions, and cultural backgrounds, gathered over dinner to talk about career pathways in the age of artificial intelligence.
We began not with predictions about the future of work, but with memory:
Think of a time when an unexpected change disrupted the path you thought you were on—but eventually opened a possibility you had not imagined. What helped you move from uncertainty toward curiosity or opportunity?
The stories that followed were personal and varied: jobs lost and paths altered, a literal earthquake, relationships ending, surprises in parenting, relocations, illness—plans that once felt certain becoming impossible.
Many of the stories followed a similar arc: an unwilling acceptance of something that initially felt like hardship, followed—sometimes years later—by gratitude for where it led.
Not gratitude for the pain itself, and not the easy insistence that everything happens for a reason. Something more grounded: the recognition that a life can widen after it has been disrupted.
One person spoke about writing as a form of healing. Another said simply:
"I like miracles."
There is a great deal of fear surrounding AI and the future of work, much of it justified. Jobs are changing. Some will disappear. Career paths that once seemed reliable are becoming less stable. Entry-level work, in particular, is already being transformed—and in some cases eliminated—as AI takes on many of the tasks through which people have traditionally learned a profession.
There is also frequent avoidance of the nuance—whether by declaring that AI will solve everything, pretending that nothing fundamental is changing, or deciding that refusing to engage with it at all is an adequate response.
Our conversation resisted those sweeping positions. Instead, it moved toward harder questions: What kinds of human capacities will matter most in a changing world? What is education actually for? How do we prepare young people not only to enter a workforce, but to think critically, exercise judgment, and find purpose in their work and lives?
As the evening unfolded, the conversation became less about predicting which jobs will survive and more about what kind of society we might choose to build amid significant technological change.
Someone asked: What would education focused on care look like? How do we teach care rather than competition?
That question pushed our conversation about career pathways in the age of AI into deeper territory: what assumptions are built into the way we prepare young people for work?
For generations, one of the dominant promises of education has been relatively straightforward: do well in school, go to college, earn a degree, and gain access to a stable career and a better life. For many young people, that path now includes substantial debt—and the employment outcome at the other end is increasingly uncertain.
Recent college graduates are already feeling that shift. As of mid-2026, their unemployment rate was about 5.6 percent—well above the rate for workers overall—while roughly four in ten were underemployed, working in jobs that typically do not require a college degree (New York Fed).
As the old bargain becomes less reliable, the question is bigger than how we make young people more competitive. What is the promise of education now? And beneath that are even more fundamental questions: what kind of future are we trying to build, and what will people need to know, understand, and be able to do to shape it?
Are we bound to economic structures that measure education primarily by its usefulness to the workforce? Must school exist mainly to produce workers who can meet the demands of the existing economy?
Or might education help people become creators rather than consumers—and participants in building something different?
AI gives these questions new urgency—and a new opportunity to answer them differently.
When memorization, formulaic writing, information retrieval, and many routine tasks can increasingly be handled by machines, some familiar educational practices begin to look less like preparation and more like habit. We have to ask more seriously what kinds of learning remain essential when reproducing information is no longer a scarce skill.
One theme that surfaced repeatedly was the value of making real things in the real world—work with consequence beyond a grade or classroom exercise.
If AI creates an opportunity to reconsider what we ask human beings to spend their time doing, perhaps this is part of the invitation: to expand, rather than narrow, our understanding of what counts as valuable work and valuable learning.
Can we teach people to use powerful new tools without training them to surrender their judgment to those tools?
That question exposes an uncomfortable contradiction. Much of traditional schooling has rewarded compliance, correct answers, and acceptance of information presented by authority. Discernment, questioning, weighing multiple perspectives, and examining how knowledge is produced have often been less central. We have not consistently taught learners to question authority—and now, suddenly, we are asking young people not to accept whatever an authoritative-seeming machine tells them at face value.
But that requires habits we have not yet cultivated deeply enough, and in many cases have actively discouraged.
There is something exciting in that challenge. AI is creating new problems, certainly. But it is also exposing existing weaknesses on a grand scale—and perhaps, if we choose to respond thoughtfully, creating new urgency and opportunity for meaningful change.
The personal stories from the beginning of the evening echoed that same possibility: disruption can unsettle what seemed certain, but it can also create space for something new.
That does not mean every disruption is a gift. It does mean uncertainty and possibility often arrive together.
The technology may be new, but the capacities we believe young people need most are not.
Collaboration. Agency. Care for our community. Self-care and wellness. Creativity. Critical thinking. Personal responsibility. The ability to communicate across difference. Conflict resolution. Imagination. Vision.
We value these competencies as much as we value traditionally academic ones. Demonstrating them is a graduation requirement at LightHouse, weighted equally alongside academic coursework.
These are not "soft skills." They are increasingly central to the future of work and the future of learning. And they are not developed through passive compliance.
We build this through relationship. Every student has a dedicated advisor, and together they develop a sense of vision—a map for the student's own life—rather than simply moving through a predetermined sequence of courses. Our students are known well. They are trusted with real responsibility. They work with others, make decisions, create things that matter beyond a grade, and learn to connect what they are doing now with the person they are becoming and the life they want to build.
We are not interested in training students to compete with machines at tasks machines can do faster. Nor is our goal simply to prepare young people for the future of work. Since 2015, LightHouse has been creating the space for young people to develop agency, imagination, and a sense of direction for their own lives—and to see themselves as people who can help shape what comes next rather than simply adapt to or accept what is handed to them.
AI makes that work feel more urgent, not because the answers are suddenly clear, but because so many old assumptions are becoming less reliable. This moment asks us to think more carefully about what we value, what we are willing to let go of, and what kind of future we want to build together. What once sounded idealistic is turning out to be the most practical preparation for what comes next.
We'll keep setting the table. Come pull up a chair.
Two years ago this week, LightWorks Collective took ownership of 92–114 Race Street in downtown Holyoke.
We thought we had acquired a building.
Looking back, I think what we really acquired was room to imagine.
As our physical space has expanded, so has our sense of what is possible. It turns out that vision grows to fill the space it's given.
In just two years we've reopened the former Gateway City Arts venues as De la Luz Soundstage and De la Luz Divine Theater, hosted more than 200 public events, launched a fresh lunch program alongside a culinary workforce training program, created the De la Luz Technical Arts Institute to hire and train young people working in professional live events, built a bike shop with a woodshop and ceramics studio close behind, opened an intimate vinyl listening room, launched Creators Campus, and gathered around the first Long Table for a new series of community conversations.
Most importantly, we've continued supporting more than 100 young people each year in choosing a new way to school. This spring we celebrated another graduating class heading in every direction imaginable—including UMass Amherst, UConn, the University of Vermont, Westfield State, Wheaton, Sarah Lawrence, Simmons, and Smith.
If anyone is still wondering whether a young person can choose a nontraditional path and go on to thrive at a highly selective four-year college, I hope we can finally put that question to rest.
We are incredibly proud of our young people—and deeply grateful to everyone who has helped make all of this possible.
And then, in the very same breath, my mind jumps to everything that hasn't happened yet.
We still need a new boiler. Expanded HVAC for the venues. New windows on the upper floors. (The basement and first floor are done!) Extending after-school programming is at the top of the list (coming this fall!). Growing food in a greenhouse on the roof—and creating a Montessori-inspired coworking space for parents and young children—are still in the dream stage.
Our 40,000-square-foot campus in Holyoke still has plenty of room for dreaming.
At LightWorks, we've often said our vision is to become a reflection of the world we want to see—a world where people learn with each other, from each other, and for each other.
Two years ago, that felt like an aspiration.
Today, I can begin to see it taking shape.
We are far from finished.
But we have most certainly begun.
We're living through a moment of extraordinary change. Artificial intelligence is reshaping education, work, and creativity faster than any of us can fully predict.
I don't think our task is simply to hold on.
I think it's to hold on to each other.
Our stake in the ground is clear. We intend to embrace AI—not uncritically, but thoughtfully—so that young people learn to use these powerful new tools wisely rather than be used by them.
At the very same time, we're doubling down on the human capacities that have been at the heart of our work all along: curiosity, communication across difference, collaboration, creativity, leadership, empathy, and critical thinking. These are not new priorities in response to AI and education. They are woven into our competency-based graduation requirements and have been the foundation of our work for more than a decade. AI hasn't changed what we believe young people need—it has made those capacities even more essential.
It is a remarkable time to be alive.
Because of your belief in this work, we were able to secure this extraordinary building. Now comes the even more exciting part: filling it with people, ideas, conversations, performances, learning, work, healing, growth, and community.
This is work that can only be done together.
Whether your passion is education, the arts, workforce development, civic conversation, or simply imagining what comes next, there is a place for you here.
Reach out.
We can't wait to build what comes next—with you.
On Wednesday, July 8 we gathered with 18 people for the first Long Table dinner. The topic was AI and Education. Big topic! You’ll be relieved to hear that we hammered out all the answers and solved everything 🙂 Just kidding. I don’t know what that would even mean.
We did not solve all the world’s problems, but for a few hours we created the kind of space that feels increasingly rare: real people in deep conversation about things that matter, sharing and listening with care and respect, open to disagreement, with no expectation that anyone would convince, enlist, or change the mind of anyone else.
The goal wasn’t consensus. It was curiosity. Over a delicious meal and drinks.
LightWorks isn't my home, but hosting the evening feels personal. It's the work my colleagues, our board, and I have spent more than a decade building. Inviting people to gather around our shared table felt a little like inviting people into my living room. There is always a bit of vulnerability in that- are these the right napkins?! Is the water cold enough?! Are they noticing that scratch in the paint?
There is also a great deal of joy in sharing a space we've spent years building for exactly this purpose: to gather, to connect, to learn from one another, and to imagine together what a better future might look like.
If I had to summarize our overall vision in one sentence, it would be this: create places where people learn with each other, from each other, and for each other.
The Long Table is an embodiment of this vision.
One of the things we’re most proud of at LightWorks is our commitment and ability to bring together diverse people. This was again true at this event. Around the table sat people from different professions, generations, nationalities, ethnicities, backgrounds, political viewpoints, and life experiences. The youngest person was 24. The oldest was 90. We had educators, parents, technologists, artists, and community members. Our local diversity—among our greatest strengths—was proudly present in the room.
And despite all those differences, there was remarkable convergence about what matters most.
The evening wasn't a panel or a lecture. Instead, we centered the conversation around two carefully chosen questions and used a two-minute sand timer as a talking piece.
The first question invited people to look inward:
Describe a time when learning felt truly alive.
Unsurprisingly, not a single person spoke about grades or assignments. Many talked about curiosity. About pursuing something because they cared about it.
They talked about the satisfaction of working through struggle. Many described learning as something that became meaningful in part because it was difficult.
Several people shared about someone who believed in them: a teacher, a coach, a mentor, a parent. Someone who helped them keep going when they might otherwise have given up.
A few people spoke about beauty, which seemed to really resonate with the group—the experience of being drawn toward something simply because it felt beautiful or meaningful enough to pursue.
Listening to those stories, the contrast with so much of our current conversation about AI was significant.
Much of the current public conversation about artificial intelligence is driven by fear. Some of that fear is manufactured by algorithms that reward outrage. Some of it is entirely justified. AI represents an extraordinary disruption.
But disruptions also create opportunities to ask better questions.
As machines become increasingly capable of memorization, compliance, information retrieval, and routine production, perhaps school no longer needs to organize itself around those abilities. Perhaps this disruption requires us to spend more time cultivating the capacities that make us human.
Our second conversation turned toward that future.
As AI changes what is easy to look up, generate, or outsource, what could education become if we used this moment well? What would you most want to see protected, strengthened, or reclaimed?
The answers echoed what had already emerged around the table: empathy, communication, collaboration, leadership, creativity, judgment, confidence, and the ability to imagine something that doesn't yet exist—and then bring it into being.
People spoke about their fears, but also the importance of AI fluency: helping young people understand these tools, think critically about them, use them wisely, and remain their authors rather than becoming their products.
One of my favorite moments came near the end of the evening when someone observed that meaningful social change has rarely begun with sweeping declarations. More often, it begins around tables like this one—in homes, cafés, community centers, and gathering places where ordinary people wrestle with difficult questions together.
The feedback we've received since the dinner has reinforced that feeling.
Again and again, people wrote about how refreshing it felt simply to have a thoughtful conversation with people they might not otherwise meet. They appreciated the diversity of perspectives. They appreciated the structure that gave everyone a voice. And many commented on how isolating our algorithm-shaped lives have become—and how different it feels to think together with actual human beings.
We don't need to agree about everything.
We do need places where we can practice curiosity and deepen our understanding through unfamiliar perspectives.
For one evening, the room became a small reflection of the world we hope to build: curious, generous, diverse, thoughtful, willing to consider difficult questions together. That feels like something worth building.
The Long Table continues every other Wednesday this summer before moving to a monthly gathering this fall. If you have a question you'd love to explore—or someone you think should be around the table—we would love to hear from you.
Summary:
This past year, our work expanded far beyond the bounds of what one school could hold. LightHouse Holyoke remains a flagship program, but our mission now includes arts access, creative workforce development, and multiple community-centered initiatives. LightWorks Collective is the new home for all of it—rooted in Holyoke, built on relationship, and shaped by a decade of growth.
In 2014, Josiah Litant and Catherine Gobron each put $500 into a bank account and started walking around Holyoke asking people what they needed from a learning center. LightHouse was born from those conversations—young people, families, educators, and neighbors telling us what wasn’t working and imagining something different with us. That first year, in a tiny space down the street, we built a program out of relationship, creativity, and a whole lot of trust.
Some of you reading this were among our Founding Friends and Angel Donors who helped us launch. Thank you, again, for believing in the potential impact of this work, and for investing in this dream.
Ten years later, we’re sitting inside a 40,000 sq. ft. facility with classrooms, performance venues, a commercial kitchen, and a maker space, having supported hundreds of young people to reshape their own lives. None of this was planned at the beginning. It grew because the community kept showing us where the gaps were—and we kept saying yes.
When we purchased and reopened this historic building, the former Gateway City Arts facility, we inherited more than square footage. Standing on the shoulders of what Lori Divine and Vitek Kruta built here, suddenly we had stages, kitchens, studios, workshops, gathering spaces, and yes… a liquor license registered under our wildly unhelpful original legal name “LightHouse Personalized Education for Teens.”
Our new facility creates new responsibility.
If we are a nonprofit committed to serving this community with every resource at our disposal, then what do we do when we suddenly have this many resources? How do we use a concert venue, a theater, a commercial kitchen, a maker space, and an entire arts campus in ways that open doors, build skills, strengthen identity, and bring people together? What does it look like to run a school and also steward a performing arts center and cultural hub for Holyoke and Hampden County?
We realized we needed a structure that could hold the full picture of our work—past, present, and emerging.
So in June of 2025 our Board of Directors voted to create LightWorks Collective, a new umbrella for everything we’ve grown into and everything we’re becoming.
LightWorks is now the home of multiple initiatives—including LightHouse Holyoke, which remains at the heart of our mission. But LightHouse is no longer the only program. Our commitment to this community has expanded, and our infrastructure has expanded with it. Our EIN is the same, but our overarching mission has grown. We've reopened the venues as De la Luz Soundstage and De la Luz Divine Theater, welcomed tenants and co-creators like Comfort Bagel and Arts Integration Studio, with more to come, shared our space with many of our nonprofit parters like Pa'lante Transformative Justice and Holyoke Food and Equity Collective, among many others, launched the De la Luz Technical Arts Institute, and we're focused on getting our 8,000 square foot community maker space up to code and publicly available asap.
LightHouse Holyoke continues to change what school can be, a mission that is more important than ever.
LightWorks Collective is expanding opportunity though education, access to the performing arts, and creative workforce development.
LightWorks allows us to name the truth. We are educators, yes. But we are now also cultural stewards, workforce builders, venue operators, community hosts, and creative collaborators.
We have tools in our hands—literally—and we intend to use them.
This name change doesn’t signal a departure from who we are. It puts language to the work we’ve already been doing and the future we’re stepping into together. Let us know if you'd like to get involved! We need board members, committee leaders, advisors, collaborators, teachers... Reach out!
This story starts in 2020, during COVID. I was in 8th grade. Growing up, I’ve always really liked school despite all the bullying I faced and the struggles at home, but a person can only endure so much before they reach their breaking point. 8th grade was when I reached mine. I went from being an honor roll student to skipping classes and not learning a single thing. I was so consumed by depression and anxiety that I felt suffocated. I understand that it was a tough time for everyone when COVID hit, and school became completely different, but I’d never done worse in my life in terms of grades. COVID was my excuse. I hid all the parts of me that I deemed weak behind my facemask. I was at an all-time low and I accepted it. I was okay because I couldn’t get any lower than I was at that moment. A constant feeling of everything and nothing all at once.
Then freshman year started. “I want to drop out of school,” I told my mother. My poor mother didn’t know what to do. Her child was sobbing every day, begging her to stay home. How could she say no? It had been months since school started, and I hadn’t gone a single day. My friends were amazed that I could go that long without receiving a letter from the school. “Lucky,” they called me. These people had no idea what that word meant. Social services had started to realize what was going on, and suddenly I was being summoned to court.
Here’s what I remember from that day: I was up for most of the night in excruciating pain and vomited a total of seven times. That was the last thing I did before I walked out the door. They had us sit in a room I’d encountered before with my social worker and two strangers in it. They told my mom that if I didn’t go to school every day without fail from that point forward, I would be removed from my household and put back into the care of my social worker. She was sobbing. I felt sorry for her, but other than that, I felt almost disassociated. I don’t remember the rest of that day.
The following week, I had to tour a new school. A school called LightHouse. The best part of it all was that there was absolutely no reason for me not to show up—the school was across the street from my house! How lovely. They would probably call me lucky. Now, I had never heard of this school before, and honestly, I wasn’t excited to start. I had been given an ultimatum, and there was no way in hell I would be able to pull this off. Or so I thought.
The school was small, but pretty. I had no intention of being there long, so I played along. I guess this school had advisors? That was new! Mine was very sweet. Her name was Lucy. If I had to drag myself out of bed to come here, at least I would be meeting with someone kind. She was almost too kind. In fact, she was the perfect advisor.
Day after day, I slowly started to realize something new. Something different. Now, don’t get me wrong, if I hadn’t been through such terrible things in my life already, this would have taken the number one spot. But I was starting to feel a bit of interest. I guess I’ve always liked writing. How come I never realized just how much I enjoyed it until I got here? My advisor started to guide me in my writing, and I thought, “Maybe a little longer wouldn’t hurt.” I kept writing and writing.
LightHouse was very supportive of me. I’d been used to being treated in a lot of ways. I knew when I was being brushed off, neglected, or taken advantage of, so this feeling was very odd. This place made the line of that ultimatum above my head blur, and suddenly the thought of dropping out no longer wandered in my thoughts. Shocked would be an understatement. This school was there to help me with whatever I needed, and I didn’t have to give up anything in return? The people here are unlike any I’ve ever met.
Through this school, I began to be able to feel again. This realization sparked something within me. Hope. There’s another way! It made me curious about how many amazing things I had yet to discover that were right in front of my eyes. LightHouse offers many things that you wouldn’t be able to find in a lot of places. I often felt left behind because of my situation before, but no such thing as “behind” existed at LightHouse. My pace may differ from others, and that’s okay. We are all human, and we learn in different ways and at different paces. This is the premise of LightHouse—an alternative way to a system that doesn’t help everyone.
I truly couldn’t express to you what going to this school has done for me. So once again, I begin to write. I never thought I would be here writing this. If you had asked me in 8th grade where I thought I’d be now, I probably would’ve told you I’d be doing absolutely nothing and rotting in bed. But I can proudly say that I’ve rekindled my relationship with my confidence in my academic ability.
I’m a senior in high school applying to college. COLLEGE. I’ve been doing all kinds of things, and I’ve honestly never been more motivated in my life. I went from declaring that I was going to drop out to applying for college. That’s what LightHouse has done for me. I couldn’t be more grateful. It seems the stars have aligned, and now it's my turn to claim the luck I once only heard of.
THANK YOU for your support, care, and encouragement through this wild 2024. This has been one of the most challenging and exciting years of my entire life.
On a personal level: Upheaval! Loss. Joy and New Developments. My daughter got married! We said goodbye to Apple, my beloved dog and LightHouse mascot. Big things ended. Big things began. Everything all at once.
On a professional level: Every bit as challenging and exhilarating.
Through a steady stream of community supported miracles, we raised $1.5M and borrowed another $2.5M (gulp) through a collaboration between Greenfield Northampton Cooperative Bank and Mass Development, and purchased and partially renovated the 40,000 sq ft. former Gateway City Arts complex at 92 Race St. in Holyoke. In a whirlwind collaboration between Houle Builders and HAI Architects, made beautiful by Sarah Reid at Small Victories Interior Design, we closed on July 18 (appropriately on the birthday of LightHouse CoFounder Josiah Litant), did a million things, and reopened in our new permanent home on September 3.
Like many of you who also love LightHouse, I have spent my life outside of the lines. Perhaps you also share that this was not on purpose. I'm somehow not the right shape for normal. I was never very good at doing things "right." This was a real problem as a young person. As an adult, it turns out to be a gift.
This personal sharing is relevant so you can see why I'm driven to work 10 million hours to create this space where young people who want and need something different can safely discover who they are and what they are capable of, and where creative adults can gather to try to make the world a better place.
Normal isn't really a thing, and so much of the pain we experience and inflict on each other is because we do not accept that in ourselves, which makes us struggle to accept it in others. As a result we co-create a culture of hierarchy and violence and unsustainable consumerism, which is great for capitalism, but very bad for our human psyches and for the other creatures sharing this planet with us.
Likely you know and understand this already, but perhaps, also like me, you sometimes lament that the problems are too big and too complicated.
All we can do is what we can do, each with our own particular gifts and pieces of an impossibly grand puzzle. LightHouse is a place where there is no one right way to be, where young people can discover and develop whatever their particular gifts are. We don’t know in advance, and we can’t figure it out for them. It’s a process of self discovery; a collaborative, supported process that includes feedback, encouragement, suggestions, and access to opportunities.
LightHouse is creating new possibilities for the young people we serve, and more than that, we are demonstrating that other possibilities are possible. I am sending these words on the last day of a very wild and exciting 2024 because I'd like to invite you to double down on your support and involvement with LightHouse for 2025. There's lots to do yet, and it only works as a together.
One-third of our annual budget comes through philanthropy, and now we’re in the midst of a capital campaign, too. We are deeply grateful for all the work the former owners of our new campus, Lori Divine and Vitek Kruta, put in to bring it to where it is, and much remains for our use as a school and community center.
We’re developing new real-world vocational programs using the facility’s two professional performance venues, De la Luz Soundstage and De la Luz Divine, as well as a culinary track in our new commercial kitchen and cafe. The basement level will become an 8,000 sq ft community maker space with your help. (Among the painful surprises of 2024 was the sudden loss of our esteemed Logan McFadden who was in the process of developing this collaborative maker space vision. We look forward to creating a tribute to them in this visionary space-to-be.)
In addition to financial contributions we welcome engagement of all kinds to help build these visions into a full reality. We have space on our Board of Directors and on committees and advisory groups. We need ideas and guidance and volunteers. Much is happening and it is SO exciting.
It’s a mess out here in the world, and it can be hard to get along. Sometimes it’s hard to get up at all. As you know, life in the world is also beautiful, inspiring, and worth showing up for. I’m inviting you to show up for LightHouse. Our cast of characters at LightHouse are often hilarious, and will also break your heart a little or a lot from time to time. Real life. Real hope. Come visit.
LightHouse Holyoke has found its forever home. We've acquired a three-building, 40,000 square foot campus in the heart of downtown Holyoke at 92 Race Street, just down the block from our previous space. This acquisition represents a monumental leap forward in our mission to change what school can be.
Our new facility, the former Gateway City Arts, is an incredible treasure on Race St., a powerful asset, and a cornerstone of the growing arts and culture district in Holyoke.
Our new home allows us to introduce several exciting new vocational tracks, a wealth of new programming, and double our enrollment over the next two years. We're launching a Production Academy where students will learn event production and stagecraft, a new theater program, setting up a community maker space to share this resource with the larger community, and developing a cafe management program to give our students hands-on experience in the culinary world. Looking ahead, we're also planning to introduce vocational programs in carpentry, metalwork, and tailoring.
The three-building campus is impressive in both size and potential. The main building spans three floors and a basement, with each level covering about 8,000 square feet. We now have a concert venue that can hold 500 people, a dedicated theater space, a cafe, various art studios, and a huge maker space. In addition to continued facility upgrades, the next phase build out includes a fine arts studio, science lab, recording studio, and media lab.
Gateway City Arts was founded and developed by Lori Divine and Vitek Kruta. We could not be more honored to take up the mantle and continue their work of developing a thriving arts and education community in downtown Holyoke.
Some things will change: Our school will be located in the main building. We’re engaged in a TURBO renovation project at present, led by Houle Construction, designed and engineered by HAI Architecture and made LightHouse beautiful by Small Victories Interior Design.
Some things will expand: There is an 8,000 sq ft maker space on the basement level that we aim to support as a community maker space. In addition to reopening as a live venue (more below), The Divine Theater will also host our new in-house theater program led by Isaac Eddy (formerly of The Blue Man Group.)
Some things will be reborn: Both venues are about to relaunch. In collaboration with Laudable Productions the large venue is being recreated as a performing arts center: De la Luz Soundstage. Laudable will also manage the Divine Theater: De la Luz Divine. Both venues will host a range of performances including nationally and internationally touring artists, building on the foundation laid by GCA. The cafe will also reopen as a public facing cafe (staffed in part by LightHouse students) as well as serve as an incubator and pop up opportunity for local chefs to offer a range of fare paired with events in both venues.
We’re excited to reopen the venues, and even more excited to use the venues as a real-world training ground for youth enrolled in our new Production Academy. Behind the scenes every event will be collaboratively produced by cohorts of young people working alongside professional adults in all aspects of event creation. Two vocational tracks will work together to engage both LightHouse students and interns (alumni and local youth aged 16-24); Production Academy: Producers and Production Academy: Stagecraft. Highly transferrable skills developed through these opportunities will serve young people as they move forward into any field. Youth who would like to move into careers in the entertainment industry will gain marketable skills and connections to nearby opportunities.
While GCA has been a well known entity, its relationship to LightHouse is less widely known.
Lori Divine and Vitek Kruta bought the former Judd’s Paper Company in 2012, and launched a 12-year journey that achieved more than would seem possible in just over a decade and through a global pandemic.
After creating a small restaurant (Tiny Kitchen), a theater, a woodshop, and art studios in the main building, Lori and Vitek bought the former garage next door and transformed it into a 500-person capacity concert hall, and began bringing nationally touring acts to Holyoke for the first time since The Victory Theater closed in 1979.
With the skills and vision of beloved local contractor, Terrence Bernhard, the team then built the cafe connector building between the main building and the garage-turned-venue, creating a three building arts complex with a huge, commercial kitchen and accompanying cafe. Our friends at Fame, another treasure just across the canal, got their Holyoke start there as The Famous Cafe. Over the years friends far and wide have enjoyed the beer garden, lunches, brunches, and untold numbers of concerts, performances, and events in the two venues, and eventually, delicious Czech cuisine in Judd’s, the third restaurant built onsite.
In the midst of expanding the GCA property, their team also acquired the STEAM Building, just down the block at 208 Race. When LightHouse was still mostly an idea in the heads of Josiah Litant and Catherine Gobron, Lori took a chance on us and we moved in as the first tenants at 208.
With the support of our angel donor, Gaye Hill, Josiah and Catherine signed the lease on behalf of LightHouse Holyoke, our freshly incorporated nonprofit. In a mad dash very similar to the one we’re in now, Terrance and his team completed the entire build out in a few short months and LightHouse opened in September, 2015.
That first day of school for LightHouse in September, 2015 we had lunch at The Tiny Kitchen in GCA with our new cohort of 19 intrepid students. When it was time for our first graduation in 2017, we held it in the GCA space that later became Judd’s Czech Restaurant. (Photos below!)
Over the years GCA has hosted many events for us... it’s been a decade of connection.
Thanks to an amazing set of visionary donors who together generated $1.5M, and the support of Greenfield Northampton Cooperative Bank with a bond through Mass Development to cover the rest of the purchase and renovations, we closed on July 18, 2024 (which is also Josiah’s birthday!) Perfect and meant to be in every way.
We are in a full on flurry of renovation activity before opening in the new space in just a couple weeks. We’d love for you to come in for a tour!
Many thanks, again, to Lori and Vitek for all of your work in Holyoke. LightHouse is eager to continue your vision. We consider ourselves stewards of this jewel you have created. We are deeply honored to open the doors wide and share this incredible resource with the Holyoke community and beyond.
Anyone who has experienced a moment of delight with another person as they grasp a new skill or concept knows what learning looks and feels like.
Their delight in that moment of insight is our delight, and all the more if we had some kind of helping hand in it. It’s a little spark of joy that illuminates both learner and witness for a moment.
Those moments of spark are not an all-day feeling. The vast majority of our time is spent in the challenge, the figuring-out, whether it's how to get to the next level in the video game, or the toddler figuring out how to click their own carseat, or how to make your glider fly straight. Mostly, we're a little bit frustrated. That's also what learning looks like, ideally peppered with enough sparks to keep our enthusiasm up.
The role of the adults at LightHouse is to create the conditions where exploration and discovery feel possible, and to support each young person to define and structure appropriately frustrating challenges that will result in just the right number of motivating sparks.
The whole thing is more like gardening than what we typically think of as "teaching." Plants want to grow. It's their nature. You don't have to make them. What you have to do, as a gardener, is to create the right conditions for growth to happen; enough wind and weather to develop inner strength, but not so much that the shoots are flattened. The analogy goes on. Enough light and water, but not too much...
The plant knows what it is and what it can produce- it's coded into the seed. The idea of a watermelon or a sunflower or a ginko tree is both unfathomable and somewhat preposterous when holding an unknown seed. The only thing that we can know, and must believe, is that each seed has it's own blueprint and innate potential to express its unique beauty.
We believe that not only does this potential exist, but that the entire world benefits from its expression as a vital contribution to our infinitely vast ecosystem. The expression is a benefit to the individual plant (or child), to be sure, but it's also an essential benefit to our interconnected human community in ways that we can neither predict nor fully understand.
We believe that the goal of a learning space, commonly known as "school," is to create the conditions where growth and flowering are supported.
On the mission page of our website, toward the bottom you'll find a section called We Believe. One of the statements is: "As adults working with young people, we should mostly strive to “make possible” rather than “make sure.”
Thanks for joining us in this work of making possible.
The media has been abuzz about it!
Here's a link to an article and photos on masslive.com
We've got big plans:
LightHouse is partnering with Laudable Productions to reopen the former Gateway venues at 92 Race and develop an integrated "Production Academy" a vocational program for the entertainment industry. Through hands-on, real-world engagement, interested students will learn all of the skills involved in hosting shows and festivals, from artist management to sound and lighting, in the context of a live venue.
Interested youth and families should reach out to David Lane for information on how to get involved.
LightHouse Holyoke is growing! We are in the process of acquiring the former Gateway City Arts, a three-building arts complex just down the block from our current location. Opening at the new site in September.
Founded in 2015, LightHouse Holyoke is an accredited, private school for grades 7-12, with relationships with Holyoke Public Schools and six other local districts. More like college than high school, LightHouse is competency-based, meaning that we personalize learning for each student to achieve a robust and structured set of skills and understandings rather than simply complete an arbitrary sequence of courses.
Competency-based learning allows us to scaffold self-direction, build on personal strengths and interests, and open the entire world as a place of learning.
The media has been abuzz about it!
Here's a link to an article and photos on masslive.com
We've got big plans:
LightHouse is partnering with Laudable Productions to reopen the former Gateway venues at 92 Race and develop an integrated "Production Academy" a vocational program for the entertainment industry. Through hands-on, real-world engagement, interested students will learn all of the skills involved in hosting shows and festivals, from artist management to sound and lighting, in the context of a live venue.
Interested youth and families should reach out to David Lane for information on how to get involved.
Change of plans! After 18 months of trying every which way to make our vision for the Zion Building happen, skyrocketing renovation costs forced us to pull back from that project.
Into that open space came an incredible opportunity, to purchase the three-building Gateway City Arts complex down the block at 92 Race St. We've been working closely with Lori Divine and Vitek Kruta, co-owners and co-creators of Gateway City Arts to build on the amazing facility and foundation they created in Holyoke over the last 12 years.
Our goal is to open in the new space this coming September.
We are absolutely thrilled at the possibilities this acquisition offers. Here is the listing if you'd like to see photos.
The purchase includes three buildings, within which are two performance venues. The 100 person capacity, Divine Theater will be occupied by LightHouse by day for our theater program and other classes and activities, and will be shared with the community on evenings and weekends.
A second 500 person capacity venue is housed in a separate, adjacent building and will be leased to a partnering organization. The large venue (new name coming!)- will continue as a concert and performance hall for nationally touring acts AND become home to a Production Academy, a new program within LightHouse for youth to learn skills entailed in the entertainment production industry, from lighting to sound to artist management... within the context of a live venue.
The site also includes a cafe which is fully licensed and ready to reopen as a public facing cafe. We are currently seeking someone who would like to take on the lease of the cafe with a plan to work together to develop a sequence of courses and training leading to paid work in this student-run-cafe-to-be. The cafe will make lunch for us as well as serve the public.
The main building also has a 2,000 sq ft wood shop and a ceramics studio, both of which will be part of a community maker space which will offer classes to LightHouse students during the day and to the larger community during evenings and weekends.
Each floor of the main building is about 8,000 sq ft. LightHouse will occupy the first and second floors. The first floor will hold reception, our theater, and an open common room/cafeteria space. The second floor will hold our classrooms and offices, to include a media lab, a science lab, a fine art studio, a fiber arts studio, our relocated recording studio, a meditation space, and several seminar-style classroom spaces.
The third floor will be available for lease to friends or other nonprofits.
SO MUCH is in development. Very much looking forward to your collective thoughts and guidance and to sharing updates as they unfold. Our goal is to open in the new space in September with 90 students.
2022-2023 was a year of growth and learning for LightHouse Holyoke. We created new, sustainable systems to manage our rapid growth while staying focused on individuals and our student community. We call this Human Scale. Growing while maintaining our human connection. Read all about it.
LightHouse is a recognized private school, accredited through NEASC (New England Association of Schools and Colleges). We will continue supporting Holyoke Public School diplomas through our partnership with Opportunity Academy, as well as homeschool diplomas for students choosing that track.
