Beacon Moves The Classroom Outside

Truman Gilbert looked down at a length of yellow measuring tape, studying the small, neat black numbers spanning its length. Under his hands sat the beginnings of a cat shelter and a drill at the ready. Twelve-year-old Cassidy Berson looked on, eyes narrowing over her mask. This was part of her math lesson for the day.

“That’s 32 inches,” Gilbert said. He pulled the tape measure as taut as it would go. “Do you know what half of 32 is?”

Gilbert is a teacher at Beacon Self-Directed Learning, a non-traditional program with just 14 kids who have opted out of their respective schools. This fall, it has moved its classroom from Whalley Avenue to the city’s Mill River district, where students learn beneath a large, yellow-and-white striped tent.

The outdoor learning setup is meant to deter COVID-19. It follows a local trend in which wealthier, often whiter independent schools are open for in-person learning, while resource-strapped public schools are partly or entirely remote.

The space belongs to Luckey Climbers, which builds climbable sculptures for kids around the country and the globe. None of the teachers work full time and few of them come from a traditional educational background. Due to the pandemic, the school has cut its capacity from around 20 students (although it has had as many as 29 in past years) to just 15.

“It’s the best thing to do under the circumstances,” said Catherine Fisher, Beacon’s director of educational programming. “It definitely has its challenges. As it gets colder, we can either go online, or we can stay here, or we can go to another facility. But I think that’s the new normal. Uncertainty is the name of the game.”

Beacon did not anticipate the move until late this summer, as it was planning a fall semester complicated by COVID-19. When New Haven closed its public schools in early March, Beacon did the same with its Whalley Avenue space, tucked into a strip that also includes People Get Ready bookspace and rehearsal rooms for the St. Luke’s Steel Band.

On March 12, teachers and staff at the school were still debating how best to keep classes going. By the following week, they moved entirely online. The rest of the year “was fairly successful because the community was so strong,” Fisher said.

But the fall, until recently, remained more of a question mark. Beacon teachers and administrators followed news around the city’s public schools, but also wanted to reopen their physical doors. Over the summer, the school’s small administrative team went back into the building, working to donate old furniture and maximize both indoor and outdoor space.

Elisabeth Kennedy, the school’s director of operations, recalled making a checklist that included HEPA filters, best public health practices, and protocols for social distancing. Teachers “had really put everything in place to open in the center,” she said. Then artist and professional tinkerer Spencer Luckey, who is also a Beacon parent, offered his Wallace Street lot to the school.

Luckey and his team moved into the Mill River factory, which straddles Wallace and East Streets, in the spring of 2018. With the exception of a tiny house that sits on the property, the lot is an ocean of asphalt, hedged in by a fence and a short block of overgrown grasses. Beacon staff built bright, collapsable tables, raised a tent, and added a white board. They told students all they needed to bring was lunch.

In September, they opened on an outdoor experiment. Hammocks hang at the far end of the lot for students who can’t sit still in the tent. Students bring pint-sized bicycles and skateboards in case they get fidgety. While classes follow a set schedule, students are allowed to move around the space. The program only meets three days a week.

“It’s in this place that's kind of desolate, but they make it full of life,” Kennedy said. “The community is the thing that kind of puts the life into that space. I feel it, every time I drive there. I'm going to this beautiful light place full of kid energy.”

It’s not the first place one might think of for a classroom, Fisher added. The factory is located in the industrial no-man’s-land that hangs between Wooster Square and Fair Haven, largely populated with shuttered buildings and warehouses. Directly across from Beacon’s makeshift digs, the Hamilton Street clock shop factory sits with its windows blown out and boarded up, some of the wooden beams dangling like teeth as it awaits redevelopment.

One street over—although separated by a fence and second parking lot—the New Era Rehabilitation Center and gentleman’s club Catwalk sit side by side. The closest store is Bender Plumbing, at the corner of Grand Avenue. The grocery store down the street and sleek, renovated Mill River Crossing seem much farther away than two city blocks.

Teachers have used the environment as an educational tool rather than a hindrance. On Tuesday mornings, Luckey leads a class on the elements of design. Fisher has built a botany class in which students learn to identify and label local grasses, flowering plants, and trees that grow in the area. Kennedy’s daughter Emma, a senior at Hamden High School, jumped in to teach a class on the works of William Shakespeare.

The program also pulled in Gilbert, a Hamden-based landlord and 15-year veteran of Mattel, where he worked on the front end of toy design. He learned about Beacon several years ago from Kennedy, whose daughter is the same age as his son. With Fisher, he devised “Engineering for Survival,” a 90-minute, biweekly class meant to get students thinking about how to winterize a COVID-19 safe outdoor classroom.

As temperatures began to drop last month, students started working on designs for a large blackboard on wheels and multiple solar ovens. The first week of October, they built a fire pit that now sits at the front of the lot. But before they could get further into the curriculum, they suggested there was a more immediate need: the dozens of feral cats that roam around the lot.

Fisher said that most of them live in the abandoned factory across the street. With students, she set up two feeding stations around the lot and got in touch with the Greater New Haven Cat Project. They were so excited about the animals that winterizing took a back burner.

“We try to be as responsive to students as possible,” Fisher said as a few students sailed around the lot on their skateboards and looked closely at the in-process shelter. “I don’t think students are going to be too pressed about having a winter classroom until they start getting cold.”

Last week, Gilbert started building cat shelters with the students, designing a number of schematics and then pulling out a large, rectangular piece of plywood to teach from. After students studied the plywood—measurements and math are part of the class—Gilbert marked it up and sawed it into the pieces. Next week, students plan to paint the shelters and line them with straw, which they’ve learned is the most absorbent for animals.

Thursday morning, students gathered around to measure the pieces and fit them into each other. Gilbert explained that the structure, which stands on four small legs with cat-shaped doors, is designed to hold two cats at a time. After doing a demo with a drill, he turned it over to Cassidy. She leaned in, watching as two pieces fused together at the mouth of the drill.

“I love animals, and I feel like I really am hoping they [the cats] will like it,” she said. “I’m worried that not many people out here want to help them.”

Just a few feet away, 12-year-old Koshibu Rawling watched as nails bit into the wood and whirled until they were fully embedded inside. Cassidy guided him through using the drill, pushing down with his weight. Koshibu took over. The drill growled and buzzed in his hands.

“That was kind of fun!” he said. When he spoke to her classmates, two neon-blue wings flapped on his sweatshirt, turning her momentarily into a flying unicorn. A mop of felted, rainbow-colored fabric on his hood looked as though it were a mane.

While he said he is used to nontraditional learning environments, he has never gone to school outside. Between figure drawing and cat house construction Thursday, he took time to track the movement of the moon, a half-full ghost of which still hung in the blue sky. He said outdoor classes have made him more attentive to weather and wind, gusts of which blew over the lot on Thursday. 

“It’s kind of relaxing to be able to build things,” he said. “Student-driven learning is pretty great—it means that I can learn things that I want to learn. I’m ahead of my grade level in math, and I love it. I never really knew about architecture, and then I learned about it.”

For Gilbert, that’s part of the process. The class is designed to teach a little bit of math, a little bit of engineering, and a lot of practical experience and teamwork. When the structure itself was done, he bent sideways, looked around and introduced a new problem: there were no doors for the cats to get in. He drew two pointy-eared shapes onto the shelter.

“I need to cut a hole here, but how do I get a saw in there?” he asked three students.

Three gathered around him, analyzing the shape. Cassidy’s eyes widened as Gilbert got out a saw and began to talk her through how to navigate curves. He used a drill to cut holes in the center of the shape, where the saw was meant to go. Desi Chaplin, a 9-year-old who just moved to Branford from Seattle, wheeled by on her bike and stopped to watch.

On the 43-hour, 3,000-mile drive to Connecticut, her family stopped at multiple farms to camp along the way. She said that getting to know the farm cats made her especially excited for the project. She praised what she had seen of the state, which she called "a lot more lush" and welcoming than Seattle.

“I’m just really happy here,” she said. “I love the cold, and it’s just so fun to build things.”

A few feet away, students were taking turns sawing. Koshibu guided the tool as it hummed in his hands. Gilbert and students made the last few cuts in the wood, watching as a shape popped out and a door emerged. Students fanned out across the space to eat lunch.

“It’s quite challenging to come up with new programming,” he said. “But I think today was pretty valuable.”