The first thing you notice when you step into the lobby of The Learning Community Charter School in Central Falls is the smell of fresh coffee. The large lobby of this former nursing home is a big, bright space, furnished with café tables and chairs, where coffee and the day’s newspaper invite the parent dropping off a child to sit down for a moment before heading off to home or work.

“In the morning, there’s always hot coffee,” says Sarah Friedman, who, with Meg O’Leary, founded and now runs the school. “We really want the parents to feel welcome. Well, we welcome everybody, but especially the parents.”

The parents come from Providence, Pawtucket and Central Falls. Eighty-eight percent of the 280 children are eligible for subsidized lunch, so these are just the sort of parents whom most urban schools keep at arm’s length. Here they are critically important partners in the difficult task of educating challenged kids.

As I sipped my coffee in the foyer and watched the kids tumble into school, all backpacks and giggling, two parents stopped to rave about the school. As they left, Friedman noted that the two happened to be among the school’s handful of middle-class parents. The school’s mission is to serve low-income kids, but middle-class people have put their names into the lottery for seats at the school — and have been very happy with the results.

No wonder. According to the SALT survey, the Learning Community has the best record of involving parents of all schools in the state. Now serving grades K-4 and growing a grade a year to grade 6, the school is classified as “high-performing” and has the highest test scores of the urban, low-income schools.

The secret to this success? It’s unusual. The founder/directors listen. Formally, systematically and regularly, they manage to hear from every member of the school community. New parents, to name only one constituency, have private meetings with the co-directors to talk about their own educational experience and hopes for their child. Twice a month — once in the morning and once in the evening — the directors have a café with the parents that begins by opening the floor to them. So the parents told the staff that they talked too much at open house. Instead, parents wanted to talk to each other, with the help of a facilitator. And that’s how it was the following year.

Besides the usual faculty meetings, the directors hold “listening meetings” when each teacher has an hour alone to answer guiding questions the directors pose, or just to say whatever is on her mind.

Friedman estimates that about 60 percent of their work comes from the formal listening sessions. “Everyone is thinking about the organization from such different perspectives.” Perspectives they wouldn’t know about unless they asked and listened.

For example, this past fall, the fourth-grade teachers came to the directors complaining that the math textbook series they’d been working with had been fine for K through 3, but was wrong for grade 4.

In most schools, teachers who voice concerns about the curriculum are considered whiners. Regular teachers are told what to do — and when and how — way too often.

At the Learning Community, teachers develop their own curriculum. For two weeks every August, aided by a reading specialist and an instructional coach, the three teachers on each grade-level team decide the scope of their work for the year, and then plan each day’s lessons for the first three months. They adapt their math curriculum from textbooks, but everything else is borrowed, reshaped or invented to help all the students meet the Grade Level Expectations established by the state.

At this school, the teachers and the academic program are synonymous. If there’s a problem, the teachers sound the alarm quickly or risk losing ground with the kids.

O’Leary says, “We’re on the rapid response method here; we can’t make up for months and months of a big mistake. If the teachers don’t think the prepared curriculum is working, the least we can do is stop everything and get them what they need.”

Friedman and O’Leary first met in the late 1990s, while working on a Providence project called Teaching for Tomorrow (TFT). These two, and others, collaborated with teachers in six Providence schools to find and implement whatever programs or training would best help these urban teachers be successful.

But the lessons were largely negative. O’Leary says, “Providence is full of amazing teachers. So we were excited. We’d ask them what’s preventing you from doing your jobs? They’d say, ‘we have no common planning time. We can’t learn from one another because the schedules don’t accommodate us observing each other. We can’t make decisions. And there’s no point in investing our time in this curriculum because it will soon change.’ ”

And so Friedman and O’Leary began dreaming of a school where they would lead by harnessing the teachers’ best thinking.

O’Leary says, “Schools often suffer from the “hero principal,” where the culture of the school is determined by a larger-than-life personality whose will or charisma determines the success of the organization. When that principal leaves, the spirit and sense of purpose drains from the school like air from a tire.”

Instead, O’Leary and Friedman have created an ongoing work-in-progress dependent on listening and making constant adjustments. Heaven knows they have their problematic parents, but as O’Leary says, “It’s a point of pride that families that come with the biggest problems and distrust have become our biggest supporters.”

That’s because they were heard.

Next week, we’ll hear from the kids and see how the school handles problem behavior.

Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence School Board, consults for government agencies and schools; she is co-director of Information Works!, Rhode Island’s school-accountability project. She can be reached at juliasteiny@cox.net , or c/o EdWatch, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.