Fusion Academy's First Day of School

Emely Reardon wants to study financial engineering and environmental policy when she heads to college. Economics have always interested her, she said, especially since she finds them to be at the heart of most political issues. She's thought of going to Brown University, and has also gotten letters to tour Princeton and Stanford.

She's also 14-years-old.

Emely doesn't fit the mold of a "typical" 14-year-old high school student, but she also doesn't go to a typical school. She's the first student through the doors of the Fusion Academy and Learning Center's newest campus, which opened in Pasadena on Monday. Fusion Academy is an alternative private school that emphasizes one-on-one classes with students who are either struggling with -- or in Emely's case, unfulfilled by -- the traditional school setting.

"I wanted one-on-one learning because regular high school wasn't really meeting my needs," said Emely, who grew up in San Francisco but now takes a pair of buses from her home in the Burbank-Toluca Lake area to go to Fusion Academy. "I was once in a classroom that had 60 kids in a room made for 25. I mean ... standing room only."

Emely is the day's lone student in the school's decorated but temporary space. She will be joined by others later in the week, and at the end of the month, the hope is that she will have four other schoolmates. By the middle of May, Fusion Academy of Pasadena plans to move downstairs to a much bigger space that would also make room for a professional recording studio, as well as an art studio. Including Emely and her classmates-to-be, enrollment is capped at 60 students per campus. Fusion Academy has already opened in other Los Angeles area towns, including Calabasas. Hermosa Beach and Warner Center campuses will be opening in April.

When students come in, they encounter teachers who specialize in a variety of subjects. Ryan Loucks of Silver Lake teaches music, theater, health and physical education. Mo Lee, a Pasadena resident who worked as a biologist in Alaska, teaches math, geometry, science, physiology and, of course, biology.

Lee said a wealth of life experience can only help a teacher's ability to reach students.

"It's not just teaching, it's teaching and mentoring to students," he said. "We're teaching them how to be people."

The concept of homework is also different, as students never really take their homework home, said Francisco Ayala of Monrovia, the head of school for the Pasadena campus.

"We have the Homework Cafe, where the homework is done here with the support of other students and the teachers," he said. "It's very focused ... if a student has a question, it can get answered right away instead of them sitting around with their hand raised."

Unanswered questions and frustration with her own experiences with traditional schooling are what spurred Michelle Rose Gilman to hatch the Fusion Academy concept more than 20 years ago in San Diego. She was an educational therapist, tasked to help kids who were alternative learners. 

"We eventually threw our hands up and said, 'We need to do something,'" she said Monday. "Because it got to the point that no matter how hard we were working, the kids still weren't being successful in school."

Gilman believes that many kids are disenfranchised "left and right" with the more traditional education model, with budget cuts sacrificing arts programs -- therefore freezing the creative juices and potential of many students (hence, the recording and art studio at Fusion campuses). But she also believes that with movies such as Race to Nowhere bringing educational issues to light, that change could be coming and more people could be looking at alternative education.

"I think in 10 years you're going to see an entire paradigm shift," she said.

Among the school's tenets are personalized one-on-one classes tailored to the needs of the student. It's also designed to be flexible -- the school's model is year-round and students can start or stop any time within the year. Fusion uses letter grades, but also emphazises that students must show a level of mastery in their subjects before they progress. Gilman said the minimum level of required mastery is 70 percent. Gilman also said Fusion Academy also uses standardized testing like other schools. 

Tuition for one academic year costs $30,000 to $35,000 for a full load of eight classes. Since Fusion Academy is not a nonprofit, it does not have funding for scholarships.

The school's flexible scheduling has made it more accommodating to students from varying walks of life, from the learning disabled to youngsters who excel in sports, Gilman said. This is especially helpful to the kids who need to balance their professional sports lives with schooling.

"We have a lot of tennis kids and surfers who need to take the time to go to tournaments," she said.

The question of life balance usually comes up when the discussion of alternative learning comes across, especially the kind of one-on-one tutoring Emely finds herself in.

"I think people worry you'll be like, antisocial," she said. "But it's about forming a bond with your teacher in that setting ... my parents were worried that I wasn't going to be around kids my own age, but I think the homework cafe allows more interaction with other students. It also takes down the stress. I used to fight with my parents all the time about doing homework."

There's also still the latent stigma attached to non-traditional learning. Emely and Gilman both mentioned that schools like theirs have either been tagged as a "hippie" school, or a place where kids who are "less than" the norm go.

"I think once you get a generation that's gone through this, people are going to start to warm up," Emely said. 

Fusion Academy and Learning Center for Pasadena is at 825 Colorado Blvd.

Sonia Narang contributed to this article.