LightHouse Holyoke

10/06/2026

What's for lunch?

At LightHouse, this is a VERY important question.

Tortilla-crusted tilapia. Chicken and sausage gumbo. Posole. Chicken tikka masala. Pizza bagels made with day-old Comfort Bagels and homemade sauce. And, every day, fresh fruit and a salad bar.

Chef Sara Barnes and Second Chef Ricky Montalvo make it happen alongside a rotating crew of LightHouse students—and those students are doing much more than helping with lunch.

They're learning their way around a commercial kitchen, earning ServSafe certification, and developing real culinary skills. Some are already taking those skills into paid work at concerts and catered events right here at De la Luz.

Then, around noon, everybody comes downstairs and we eat together.

We talked with Sara about feeding teenagers (they have opinions), getting young people to try unfamiliar foods, teaching students to cook for other people, her unlikely journey from biochemistry to the kitchen—and why sitting down together for a meal feels especially important right now.

Also: the kids apparently loved the posole. The tortilla-crusted tilapia has some work to do.

Lunch Is Part of the Curriculum: What’s for Lunch?

https://lighthouseholyoke.org/lunch-is-part-of-our-curriculum/

10/02/2026

We've spent generations telling young people that education is the way out.

What if we built a way in?

Read: The Way Out: https://lighthouseholyoke.org/the-way-out/

09/28/2026

More than a decade ago, Aitabé Fornés left high school teaching to follow another path. This fall, she came back to the classroom as LightHouse’s new 10th grade advisor.

In the years between, Aitabé immersed herself in Family Constellations, somatic listening, coaching, and Sensethinking, an approach she developed to help learners draw on a wider range of ways of knowing.

In our latest blog post on the LightHouse website, Aitabé shares why she left teaching, what brought her back, and what fourteen years outside the classroom taught her about learning, connection, and the intelligence we don’t always see.

We’re very glad she chose LightHouse.

09/25/2026

Last night around the Long Table, we took on Understanding the Data Center Dilemma.

It was not an easy conversation. There was real concern and real anger about corporate power, water, energy, and who gets a say. There was also the harder work of complicating the picture.

People disagreed. People stayed. And people stayed kind.

We didn't leave with a shared position. We left knowing a little more about the issue and about one another. That feels worth celebrating.

Read the full reflection: https://lighthouseholyoke.org/ai-is-divisive-we-love-that/

09/22/2026

We’re very lucky to have Carlos “REC” McBride leading restorative culture and belonging at LightHouse.

REC brings deep experience, steadiness, curiosity, and care to the complicated work of building community across difference. He helps young people navigate conflict, understand impact, repair harm, and stay in relationship when things get hard — and he asks adults to do the same.

Our latest piece, “Practice Playing With Others,” is about why this work matters so much. Diversity is more than bringing different people into the same room. The real learning happens when we practice listening, communicating, collaborating, repairing, and belonging together.

Explore how diversity in education helps young people build empathy, communication, collaboration, belonging- skills to navigate real life

09/18/2026

AI has made it easier than ever for students to produce work without doing the thinking.

But AI didn’t create the cheating problem.

The bigger question is whether the work we ask students to do is meaningful enough to require real thought, judgment, curiosity, and effort.

At LightHouse, we’re not interested in pretending AI is going away. We’re interested in helping young people understand it, use it thoughtfully, and know when using it gets in the way of learning.

Our latest piece explores what AI is revealing about school, cheating, and the kind of learning that actually matters.

Banning AI Will Not Solve the Cheating Problem

Cheating predates AI. Bans miss the real problem: schools built more for compliance than learning. Here's what LightHouse does differently.

09/15/2026

What do you do when your teenager hates school?

Our culture tends to assume the answer is: make them push through.

This week’s piece asks a bigger question: Why do we believe succeeding in school is worth so much suffering?
https://lighthouseholyoke.org/what-to-do-when-your-child-hates-school/

LightHouse Holyoke is an accredited, competency-based middle and high school in Western Massachusetts for grades 7–12, offering personalized academics, hands-on learning, and real-world pathways.

09/10/2026

AI is making it easier than ever to produce polished schoolwork without doing much learning.

That forces schools to ask a harder question: what was the learning actually for?

In our latest piece, we look at productive struggle, AI fluency, and why meaningful work matters more—not less—in the age of AI.

At LightHouse, we believe young people should learn to use powerful tools without outsourcing judgment, curiosity, creativity, or responsibility.

Read: Meaningful Work Matters More in the Age of AI

AI is making it much easier for students to produce polished work without doing much learning. That is a problem. It is also clarifying something schools should have confronted a […]

09/08/2026

Please join us in celebrating David Lane, our new Head of School.

This is David’s fifth year at LightHouse—and his 35th year as an educator committed to opening new possibilities for young people.

David knows our students, our staff, our families, and the complicated, joyful reality of changing what school can be.

This transition is an important one for LightHouse, and for LightWorks Collective as a whole. As LightHouse continues to deepen and evolve under David’s leadership, Catherine will be able to focus more fully on the larger work of LightWorks: new programs and partnerships, performing arts, creative workforce development, and the rapidly changing future of learning.

We could not be more excited about what comes next.

09/02/2026

AI can now write, code, summarize, and retrieve almost anything instantly. So what's actually left for school to teach?

Our answer, and why we built LightHouse around it more than a decade ago: https://www.lighthouseholyoke.org/ai-and-education-different-kind-of-school/