NORTH HAVEN

The steady growth of the Slate School received a boost with a $50,000 grant from the VELA Education Fund that will go toward the expansion of the North Haven educational institution.

"We're so grateful for VELA's support, connections, and resources," said Jennifer Staple-Clark, founder and Executive Director of Slate School. "We founded Slate School six years ago because we want children to be driven and inspired by their joyful curiosity and creativity. And now, here we are. We have an amazing community of students who are innovative, collaborative, compassionate thinkers, and world changers."

The Next Steps grant will support the development of Slate’s Upper School curriculum, which will be a separate and interdisciplinary approach to learning that its founders have been working on throughout the past year.

The Upper School is expected to open its doors to Slate’s first cohort of 7th-graders in fall 2024, with plans to add an additional grade in each subsequent year. With many families on the wait list for enrollment, Slate is expected to have a K-12 student population totaling 160 learners by fall 2029.

Slate began educating its first cohort of 6th-graders at the start of the current academic year. Head of School and Chief Innovator Julie Mountcastle described the students as “a wonderful embodiment of the kind of learner-directed education that we offer here.”

“We are seeing the fruits of this labor here every day,” she said.

Mountcastle and Staple-Clark thanked Slate’s students, their families, and the community of North Haven for their support along the way of the school’s development.

The Next Steps grant is consecutive to the $10,000 “microgrant” that Slate received from VELA last year. It is the type of grant awarded to the school and others of its ilk that are fostering an unconventional learning ecosystem within their communities. The nontraditional education model that starts with the individual interests of students at Slate, coupled with the early success the school has seen six years after opening its doors, is what made Slate appeal for the larger $50,000 grant, according to VELA’s Director of Programs Lauren Grevel.

“They're really committed to making this type of learning accessible for families…They really demonstrated that there's this huge demand for their families that they're already serving to go beyond grades K-6,” said Grevel.

With the success Slate has seen in that nontraditional educational ecosystem, the Next Steps grant is thus a follow-up to the microgrant and is intended for the school’s leaders to meet the significant demand that is seen on its wait list.

“That’s what our Next Step Grant opportunity is all about: looking at those we invested in at the $2,500 or $10,000 level and looking at those that are poised for growth and have demonstrated early success with their program,” said Grevel.

Mountcastle said this recent recognition from VELA “is a reminder to us that the students here, and the work we've been doing here is important and very real and very powerful.”

The development of Slate extends beyond the grants as VELA has included the school in the international Mastery Transcript Consortium network of public and private secondary education institutions.

“That has connected us with like-minded schools from all over the world who are seeking to find better and more holistic ways to tell the story of student achievement,” said Mountcastle. “That is a really powerful conversation to be part of.”

Since opening in 2018, Slate has seen a “slow, manageable growth” that is gradually meeting the vision of Staple-Clark one additional grade at a time, said Mountcastle. Even with a significant wait list, Slate’s leaders feel confident that the school will be fully realized all the way up to the final grade level.

“We feel so confident that we can make sure that we maintain the excellence that we have built here in grades K through six, all the way from grade 12, because we're doing it in that very intentional, careful way,” Mountcastle said. “We’re very busy here, but we’re busy in such a good way.”

Grevel said this steady and manageable growth serves as an inspiration for other educational leaders who are looking to establish their own nontraditional learning ecosystem that can be appealing for families. Grevel feels this is why Slate was worthy of its second and larger financial award from VELA.

“We want to support folks that have built viable programs that offer families alternatives to the conventional schooling or contribute to the sustainability of the out-of-system ecosystem, and I think Slate School does both of those: They are providing that alternative to conventional schooling, but they're also contributing to the ecosystem and helping others start models, and they clearly built a sustainable model that, in fact, secures their place for massive growth,” said Grevel.

More information on Slate School can be found at slateschool.org/.