Throughout the country, passionate educators are rethinking how to transform schools and support young learners. Often their solutions are precisely tailored to the needs of the communities they serve.

Colby Heckendorn and Genevieve Backer started with a simple premise: Learning should be joyful. They toured more than 70 schools in just two years to gather best practices, then used those as the foundation on which to co-found Atlas Public Schools in St. Louis, Missouri, where Heckendorn is Executive Director and Backer is Chief of Staff.

Atlas has a unique, year-round, diverse-by-design model that helps students, working parents and teachers thrive. Seven academic sessions span the year, each with roughly five weeks on and one to two weeks off. But those two weeks aren’t vacation; students have a camp-like experience of enrichment activities, while teachers have a week for planning and a week to recharge. As Heckendorn says, “If you want students to thrive, you have to invest in teachers.”

The approach is working. Atlas is outperforming peers across the state and the nation; their third graders, for example, ranked in the 84th percentile for growth in math on the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) mid-year assessment. “And we’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible,” Heckendorn says. Atlas opened its doors in the fall of 2021 as a K-1 school. Over the past three years they have grown with their students, adding a grade level each year, and have nearly tripled in size. Now, the school is moving to its “forever home.” “Before we started, people told us that finding a school facility would be the hardest part of building Atlas,” Heckendorn notes. “They were right.”

Atlas purchased a former Veteran’s Administration building that had been sitting vacant for two years and is renovating in a phased approach with funding from LISC, a peer CDFI, which includes a $7.77 million participation loan from BlueHub, our first loan in Missouri. Rows of cubicles are now classrooms. New HVAC systems deliver high energy efficiency. Proximity to St. Louis’ Metrolink allows families from across the city to benefit from an Atlas education.

“We couldn’t have done it without BlueHub,” Heckendorn says. “We knew through experience that no traditional lender would touch us. We were too new. We had to find an organization that specializes in nonprofits, with experience in charter schools.”

In New York City, Great Oaks Charter School (GO-NYC) needed similar expertise. Founded in 2013, GO-NYC is a college preparatory school. Bolstering the traditional curriculum, AmeriCorps tutors provide every student 90 minutes of individualized small group instruction weekly, focused on English language arts and mathematics; they also provide social and emotional support. The goal: To guide students who will shape the world, not be defined by it. Although GO-NYC’s charter is for grades 6-12, space constraints had limited the student population to grades 6-10. With a $4.8 million construction loan from BlueHub Loan Fund, they renovated a six-story former Catholic school and convent, which can now accommodate grades 9-12 and house the AmeriCorps tutors who are so central to the school’s unique educational approach.