Bringing 2e to a Neighborhood near You

It happened in seventh grade. Jacqui Byrne, a single mother of four, could no longer watch her children “just bomb out” of their public middle school. “I knew the minute my son figured out that I couldn’t make him go to school, he wouldn’t go,” Byrne says.  An education consultant herself, she had to do something. “I put on my parent lens, not my professional educator lens,” she tells 2e News while racking up miles on the New Jersey Turnpike. At the time, she was working at a company she co-founded to help parents and students wind through the labyrinth of college applications. She realized she had to focus further down the educational-industrial complex. “I was thinking about my kids, sitting in the middle of a meeting about something else entirely, and, because I have no filter, like many 2e kids, I just blurted out, ‘We’re going to start a school,’” she recalls. Her partner, not exactly Judy Garland to her Mickey Rooney, said, “No, we’re not.” Byrne did. FlexSchool started that spring in 2014. There were seven students, two of them Byrne’s own children. Now there are 72 spread out over three separate campuses. “I always thought of FlexSchool as a network of small schools,” Byrne says, explaining her innovative approach to creating a network of micro-schools, renting out rooms in office spaces in different communities, all linked by a common strength-based, 2e philosophy. “I thought if we had only one school, we would be leaving a lot of kids out,” she says. “It’s really a question of allowing kids to access a place that would be better for them. We have kids that remote in from around the world and we also have kids traveling an hour and a half each way. It’s crazy to make them do that.” Ideally, students wouldn’t have to travel more than a half hour each way. “Still a bunch of time, but not as invasive on the rest of a kid’s life,” Byrne says. Currently, there are three FlexSchool campuses. The flagship starter school is in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. The second opened soon after in New Haven, Connecticut. A third will service the Rockville, Maryland area, though it’s temporarily housed in Washington, D.C. Next fall, Byrne will be opening schools in Northern New Jersey and in Westchester, New York. There are plans for more FlexSchools in Seattle and Baltimore. The fossil fuels Byrne burns up on the road traveling to all the different campuses may be resources well spent to keep the schools small, accessible, and embedded in the local communities. “We use the resources of other buildings in the neighborhoods,” she says, “saving us from paying for the square footage. For example, we will use a gym to take the kids boxing. We don’t have cafeterias, so we take the kids to local restaurants. We go to museums and other places that we can walk to. In New Jersey, there’s a music school nearby, so we have them teach the kids sound engineering, music, and chorus.” That use of local assets allows FlexSchool to replicate because it costs less than to build a gym or a music studio. “Replicating has been a process,” Byrne admits. “We’ve learned to hold onto the things we hold most dear. There are other things, however, such as improving our system so kids could work across multiple campuses, that have proven more challenging. Every time we add another school it adds a layer of complexity and makes us constantly solve problems that we thought we already figured out.” [perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]I thought if we had only one school, we would be leaving a lot of kids out. It’s really a question of allowing kids to access a place that would be better for them.[/perfectpullquote] What is “most dear” at FlexSchool flexibility in creating ability-based classes that utilize the 2e nature of the students as a strength. “We ask the kids what they want to study,” Byrne says, citing the example of adding a class in linguistics this year because students requested it. The school already meets state standards in language in math, according to Byrne, but they can add a linguistics class and “lean it toward the requirement for history or English depending on that child’s needs.” And meeting a child’s needs is key. After many years of witnessing her own son’s struggles at the hands of New York and New Jersey public schools, Adrienne Bagnato finally found a place for him at the New Jersey FlexSchool. Bagnato’s son suffered through a rocky first six months during which he “was being disruptive and acting out and nearly put out of the school,” Bagnato says, before starting to turn around. After starting at Flex in eighth grade, her son is now about to graduate and apply to universities. “They really catered their teaching for him and filled in the gaps in his education, moving at his pace. They have worked into his strengths and tried to shore up his weaknesses,” Bagnato says. “But the greatest strength of FlexSchool is that the kids feel safe and welcomed. They are surrounded by kids that are similar to them. For the first time they are not ‘different.’ I think that makes them relax and is more conducive to learning. “I am seriously not sure where my son would be if it had not been for Flex.” That is the mission for Jacqui Byrne — creating environments for 2e kids to thrive in schools and, more importantly, in life. It worked for her son, who came into his own as a student and is now about to graduate and go to college, and it works for the dozens of other students FlexSchool is able to reach. “I cry a lot,” Byrne says. “I get tears in my eyes when I see a high school student reading to a fifth grader who’s dyslexic. Or just the other day, a sophomore sat next to a senior who had real challenges with social skills, and she says, ‘You look like you’re having a rough day. You know I used to have rough days like that, too.’”