By William Shelton

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries and letters to the Editor of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)

Some people fondly remember high school as a time of increasing freedom, new learning experiences, youthful hijinks, and shared adventures. Others, less so.

For me it was miserable. I had undiagnosed attention deficit disorder, which I believe is misnamed. It ought to be called “variable attention disorder.”

The problem isn’t that people with ADD can’t concentrate. If something is sufficiently stimulating, we can concentrate longer and more intensely than folks who don’t have ADD.

In fact, being able to focus is an ever present need. So our attention is drawn to whatever is most stimulating in the environment rather than what is most important. Classroom instruction, while important, is often not sufficiently stimulating to enable focus.

And being unable to focus produces in the ADDer a painful tension and restlessness that can be relieved by creating one’s own stimulus. So I was frequently in the principal’s office and detention—the former stimulating, the latter, worse than class.

Much of my homework never got done. Trying to solve equations whose methodology I didn’t absorb in class, or reading boring text to prepare for a test instead of to answer interesting questions created the same tension.

It was easier to relieve or avoid that distress by roaming the city, engaging in conversations, listening to music, or reading science fiction novels. And if I could avoid going to class, I did.

My parents and teachers told me that I was “lazy” and an “underachiever.” They had the evidence to prove it. If memory serves, when I left school I had a C- grade-point average.

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These days I’m stimulated by contemplating the Somerville STEAM Academy’s (SSA’s) design and potential. It promises to be one of the nation’s most innovative learning environments, offering kids who struggle within a traditional classroom, as I did, the opportunity to excel.

STEM is an acronym for “science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.” It came into popular use when the National Science Foundation began spreading the word that we have to step up our educational effectiveness to be economically competitive and prepare our young people to earn a good living.

Subsequently, Rhode Island School of Design President John Maeda made the case that, “art and design are poised to transform our economy in the 21st century like science and technology did in the last century. Adding art and design to STEM to create STEAM will keep America competitive.” Hence:  the STEAM Academy.

Instead of requiring students to passively absorb information, SSA intends to make them independent investigators. In order to answer questions or solve problems that they care about, they will design projects that engage them, gather required resources, manage required tasks, and then document and share what they’ve learned.

As they repeat the cycle, they will take on larger and lengthier projects. To accomplish that, they will need to learn many of the same subjects that they would in a traditional classroom, but in a way that is compelling, proactive, and stays with them.

A student can’t transform from classroom pupil to independent investigator overnight. So eighth-graders will spend much of their time in structured seminars.

But as they move through high school, they will increasingly perform project and studio work, and then conduct open-ended collaborative projects. Throughout, they will be trained in test taking, communications, analysis, and synthesis.

SSA staff will periodically assess which elements of the Common Core students absorbed as they conducted projects, and how future projects can enable them to fill in the gaps.

In accomplishing this, the kids will spend more time in school—from 10:00 to 5:00, year around. But there will be no homework.

As someone for whom homework was a futile exercise producing an abiding sense of failure, I think that’s great. And it’s great because some kids get lots of homework help at home, while others get none.

You may be wondering how students’ learning accomplishments will be assessed without narrowly defined subjects and letter grades. One answer is regular diagnostic tests that gauge their readiness for the MCAS and the SAT.

More interesting is interviews with them and critiques of their project work.  These will both guide their ongoing learning and be integrated into individualized transcripts.

SSA will recruit through year-around outreach, offering free in-school, after-school and vacation programming. SSA will select among among applicants using lotteries that are academically, economically and demographically weighted to match Somerville High’s student body.

So half of SSA enrollees will be in the bottom half of their cohort’s MCAS test performance or attendance rates. Half will be girls, and half, boys.

STEAM Academy is the creation of the people at sprout & co., who I wrote about four years ago. Not long after that, they began a series of conversations with parents, city officials and the community regarding opportunities created by Massachusetts legislation that encourages educational innovation.

They were interested in how they might incorporate what they had learned from their work and that of innovators nationwide into a new high school with a new pedagogy.

The result was a 13-page prospectus. Its July 2012 approval by the Screening Committee authorized them to form an Innovation Plan Committee, composed of teachers, experts, and a Somerville Teachers Association representative. Over the following year they prepared a 300-page Innovation Plan that the Planning Committee approved in November 2013.

It includes a commitment to ensuring that operating SSA does not financially harm Somerville High School. It achieves that in a variety of ways. For example, Somerville spends three-to-four times on students who are outplaced in special education programs what it spends on those who aren’t. Each such student who goes to SSA instead, represents a substantial savings.

The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) was excited by the Plan’s ambition. But although there are almost five dozen Innovation Schools statewide, SSA was the first to fully take advantage of the legislation’s provisions for exempting it from unproductive laws and regulations. So DESE took nearly a year to approve the application.

The Plan has won praise from innovative education leaders. Former Secretary of Education Paul Reville says that SSA is what they had hoped the legislation would produce. Larry Rosenstock, CEO of the renowned High Tech High charter school system, says that he’s never seen anything so pioneering, but so well thought out.

Somerville Schools’ new Superintendent, Mary Skipper, who was herself the first headmaster of Boston’s innovative TechBoston Academy, has been a strong supporter as well as an effective collaborator in improving the Plan. And the School Committee recently reaffirmed its support.

The last hurdle seems to be the Somerville Teachers Association (STA), which must approve any ways that the SSA would conflict with its contract. sprout & co. is committed to satisfying whatever concerns that the STA might have.

For example, the current SSA proposal would not only pay STA teachers proportionately more for longer hours. It would pay them a cost of living adjustment that tracks the ever-rising expenses associated with living in Somerville. And it would give them more time to plan and more flexibility in what they teach and how they teach it.

sprout & co. staff insist that negotiations with STA are cordial, cooperative, and not adversarial. But as far as I can tell, that’s where things have been stuck for the past year and half.

Meanwhile the sprout staff are working on the SSA without being paid for that work. And potential outside funders are becoming impatient.

I think that I would have thrived as a STEAM Academy student, but I’m about fifty years too late. There are plenty of other kids for whom SSA could make an enormous difference right now. The longer that they have to wait, the more of them will forego that life-changing opportunity.