LOWELL — As students and faculty bustled around the third floor of the Lowell Middlesex Academy Charter School Thursday morning between posterboard presentations and performances, teacher and adviser Yaneris Collado remarked that the school is a “beautiful, special place.”
“We really believe in student voice, student choice, and the power of students really discovering their journeys instead of it being a traditional one class after the other,” said Collado. “It is more, ‘How do you want to learn math? How do you want to learn science? How is that going to really help you in the future in real life?’”
As she spoke to The Sun, around her were LMACS seniors showing off the work they did throughout their tenure at the school, which typically serves students who left their original high schools before graduating or those at risk of dropping out. For those seniors it was finally their last day of school, with each taking different paths to get to that point.
Collado said LMACS provides its students with project-based learning opportunities, internships, apprenticeships, and the space they need to learn through it all.
“We just really believe in having them learn the real-life things that are important for them,” said Collado.
This year, Collado taught a senior portfolio class where the students compiled their achievements and work at LMACS in different ways. Some put it all together on a posterboard, others created websites with different pages talking about their LMACS journey, and one student talked through their experiences in conversations they recorded and uploaded as a podcast. Some students even acted out short screenplays written by their classmates.
Watching all the students excited to present their work on their last day, Collado said with a laugh that it usually starts out “frustrating” trying to get students back on track academically when they first enter LMACS, but that it is rewarding to watch their progress.
“I say it with pride, because it is the work we go through, all of us teachers. It is a really crucial time in their lives … I don’t think other schools really take that growth seriously,” said Collado.
Among the LMACS seniors was Elisha Anez, 18, who created a webpage to highlight her journey to graduation, which she said began with struggles she faced at Lowell High School in part due to the isolation and remote learning that dominated the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, she said she felt many of the faculty were disconnected from students due to the physical separation of hybrid learning.
“I felt like I wasn’t really able to speak to my teachers or communicate very effectively about my situation and what my struggle was, so I had a lot of absences,” said Anez.
So she transferred to LMACS, where she said the faculty motivated her and pushed her to do better and tackle her anxieties. Now she said she is planning for college, starting with Middlesex Community College, with an aim of later helping juveniles in bad situations or suffering from substance abuse to try to turn their own lives around.
Fellow student Christie Boncoeur, 18, said she found herself at LMACS at the end of her sophomore year in part to get more help than she was finding at a high school with 3,000 students. Boncoeur similarly created a website to talk about her LMACS experience, including her efforts to set up the school’s first-ever prom.
“It was everything I’ve overcome, everything I did. One of my biggest accomplishments was when I created the first prom here last year. That was a big success,” said Boncoeur.
At LMACS she said she was able to participate in a dual enrollment program with MCC, and now she has plans to attend Fitchburg State University this fall.
LMACS Executive Director Sean McCarthy spoke warmly about the graduating students and the efforts they’ve taken to get to that point.
“I think you could hear in some of the student speakers that the journey for them has not been a straight, well-worn path. There are some twists and turns. Here at LMACS we try to honor those twists and turns and help them turn that into a pathway and make it well-worn themselves,” said McCarthy. “Really treating them as individuals I think is part of it, and we are able to do that because we are a small school, so we don’t have to treat it like a big, monolithic system.”
McCarthy said it is “gratifying” to see the students make progress during the two or three years they spend at LMACS.
“Many of them come in with some sort of suspicion of the school, and a sense of whether or not we mean what we say, and then you can see … Eventually they start to understand that you can be who you want to be, and we’ll help you get there,” said McCarthy.
McCarthy said LMACS aims to have the student exhibition events three times a year going forward.