NASHUA — Mark Hodgkins and Jacqui Orphanos know there are artistically talented kids in school struggling to get decent grades.

With an eye to the arts, Hodgkins and Orphanos hope to establish the Williams School for the Creative and Perorming Arts in downtown Nashua.

The school would be a private school and the duo hopes to open next fall. With tuition nearly $28,000 a year, the Williams School will be exclusive, offering integrated curricula centered on intensive training in the arts, whether it’s music, dance or painting, to prepare teens for entrance into top art colleges.

“Both of us, having worked with very diverse populations, came to the conclusion that there many kids who were not getting the best of an educational experience, particularly kids who were artistic,” Hodgkins said. “And we really wanted to open a whole other school that offered the very best, high-quality, individualized education that we could.”

The pair is looking for multifaceted teachers with minds open to new education models. “A brilliant mathematician who plays a mean oboe,” said Hodgkins.

Hodgkins has worked with children for over 20 years, including work in juvenile justice, youth services and mental health. Orphanos has spent her career in education, both general and special ed, and is currently an administrator in Andover, Mass.

For Hodgkins and Orphanos, students need to understand not just the subject matter, but why it matters.

In developing the school’s principles, the writings of pedagogues John Dewey, Ted Sizer, Grant Wiggins and Deb Meier were instrumental. All were pioneers in forming new educational models.

Ophalos said Sizer’s “Coalition of Essential Schools” provides one of the cornerstones of the Williams School — mastery. A student doesn’t pass a class unless he or she truly commands the subject, whether that happens at a faster or slower rate than the rest of the class.

“It’s all mastery-based,” she said. “Until a student shows the ability to be masterful in music, math, English … they don’t go on to next level.”

The school will offer middle and high school programs, starting at age 11. During middle school, students will explore various art forms, before picking a major as they enter high school.

“We want to offer high school students the opportunity, though they’re a music theater major, to show mastery in all that they do,” Ophalos said.

Hodgkins is quick to highlight the perceived shortcomings of public schools.

“Public schools are filled with people who believe in what they do and work very hard,” Hodgkins said. “But they work in a system that is antiquated and was created for the industrial age, and has become the fast food equivalent of learning.”

He extends the criticism to universities, arguing that the drive towards specialization sacrifices the ideal of the well-balanced individual.

“The future economy will demand that people are creative,” he said. “What you do with it requires (an understanding of) design, integration, synthesis—those are things that are taught through the arts.”

Hodgkins says kids need to learn to embrace failure as a part of the learning process,and with a school system centered around assessment scores, there is little room for failure.

The Williams School will center around an integrated curriculum, with each subject tying into an overall theme. The Civil War, for instance, would take kids through not just history but also math, social studies, reading, writing and other subjects.

Chip McGee, assistant superintendent in Bedford, said the Bedford schools could use more integration in their curricula. But integrated curriculum is not an end in itself.

McGee said you could certainly teach human anatomy through studying Civil War-era amputations, but he’s not sure “you’re getting to the meat and potatoes of anatomy the way you need to.”

“The mistake is to think anything works all the time,” he added.

For McGee, New Hampshire’s public schools offer a well-rounded liberal arts education.

“That’s one of the reasons I love public schools is because the good people of Bedford help support us, employing teachers to spend time talking about great literature with their teenagers,” he said. “Yeah, we could have more art or have a required dance credit, but we have a fair amount of it, and we do literature and spend a lot of time understanding American history, European history, world history. We have a lot kids who are not going to be chemists who study chemistry.”

But McGee praised the new school not only for the opportunity it hopes to provide—he also thinks it will influence existing schools.

“I do think it can be a hard medicine to take at times, but the presence of private schools, parochial schools and charter schools puts a very healthy pressure on public schools to innovate, to explore, to break out of molds as long as we don’t go down the slippery slope of ever-reduced funding,” he said.

In the works for two years now, the Williams School is slated to open in September, with auditions beginning Nov. 11.

For more information about the School for the Performing Arts, contact Mark Hodgkins at mhodgkins@williamsschoolcpa.com, or by phone at 438-4117.

The school’s website, williamsschoolcpa.com, is scheduled to launch later this week.

srios@newstote.com