Private school brings one-on-one instruction
Even though summer isn’t over, Fusion Academy, located off University Boulevard in Sugar Land, is already in session, albeit with just four students.
Joey Harmon, 15, studies probability in geometry class.
He was self-conscious about asking questions in class and lacked skills to stay focused last year at Summer Creek High School in Humble ISD, causing him to fall behind and then fail geometry his freshman year.
So he’s retaking the class at Fusion during a summer session.
This time, he’s not only passing geometry but completing what his teacher, Ahmad Hernandez, calls A-level work.
Part of the reason is that Harmon, who now lives in Missouri City, is the only student in his class.
“There are no distractions,” Harmon said simply.
With purple- and creamcolored walls, beanbag chairs and embarrassing photos of the teachers as tweens, Fusion, which serves grades 6-12, doesn’t feel like a normal campus.
That’s deliberate, down to the school’s sandalwood scent and recording and yoga studios, because Fusion caters to students who weren’t succeeding at traditional schools because of issues ranging from anxiety to mild learning disabilities to a need for a more flexible schedule, said Curt Coffey, who is the school’s principal, called the head of school.
Fusion’s solution is to create a very individualized learning plan, with exclusively one-onone instruction.
It’s a costly education. Depending on the number of classes a student takes — the average is three per semester
— tuition can range from $20,000 to $35,000 per year, and the school doesn’t offer scholarships.
But Fusion has taken off in Texas.
Fusion began in California, but the Sugar Land campus is the third to open in the Houston area in the past few years and the seventh to open in Texas.
The other Houstonarea campuses are in The Woodlands and the Galleria.
The Sugar Land location has a capacity of about 75 students, though Coffey said the school’s plan is to grow slowly. They’re hoping to have 10 to 15 students enrolled by the first day of fall semester, Aug. 22.
The school has five teachers on staff.
Classes meet in rooms the size of small offices, equipped with white boards and decorated by teachers.
Instruction seems more like tutoring sessions than public school classes.
As Hernandez discusses mutually exclusive events and how those factor into today’s probability lesson, he constantly solicits feedback from Harmon.
Being one-on-one with his students makes it easier to try out instruction that works for them, Hernandez said.
He’s integrated dance into an English lesson and is using a dice game today to teach Harmon probability.
“It allows me the flexibility to try different things,” said Hernandez, 40.
He worked in outreach at the Children’s Museum of Houston before switching to education a few years ago. He taught at a charter school in Houston and at an elementary school in Fort Bend ISD.
Despite its sometimes unorthodox teaching methods, Fusion is a fully accredited middle and high school.
It offers three of the five statewide endorsements for its high school students and courses that transfer over to Advanced Placement credit at public high schools, as well as help with the college application process for students who are bound for higher education.
Though the school lacks sports teams — students who enroll in private club sports can get physical education credit — it offers yoga, tai chi and dance classes.
“We find though that most of our students even the ones that come in that you would think would be the last ones to be interested in yoga end up interested in yoga,” Coffey said.
Students complete homework on campus, at tables in the school’s silent study area or on couches covered in throw pillows and blankets.
They may take traditional tests, or they may complete projects instead for a grade.
Some of those projects from other campuses are framed along the hallways, including a history project where a student who loved comic books described what would have happened if the comic book character Flash would have been around during the War of 1812.
About half of the students at most Fusion campuses stick around for several years, maybe even from sixth grade through to high school graduation, Coffey said.
Others are there to catch up on schoolwork or improve study skills enough to go back to public school.
That’s the case for Harmon.
He will begin his sophomore year at Fort Bend ISD’s Ridge Point High School this fall, likely with an A in geometry and armed with new strategies to stay attention in school and get his work done at home.