CENTRAL FALLS -- On a drizzly morning, school director Sarah Friedman follows her usual 8 a.m. routine, greeting students as they walk through the door.

“Morning, Guadalupe. Morning, Diana. Morning, Kimberly,” Friedman calls.

She turns to a man sitting at one of the café-style tables in the school’s lobby.

“Francisco, would you like something? Some coffee?” Friedman asks in Spanish.

Francisco, one of the school’s bus drivers, has just finished his run.

About a dozen parents chat over coffee in the café area, where a half-dozen round tables, leafy plants and a couch sit under large windows. The school’s full-time social worker mingles with parents, speaking in Spanish and English. He was hired in the school’s second year when administrators realized the needs of their students and families required one.

At the front desk, a small boy, wearing the school uniform — a light blue oxford shirt and dark blue trousers — goes directly to Jackie Torres, the school’s administrative assistant.

“He was having trouble when he entered the classroom, being unsettled and with his papers flying out of his homework folder,” Friedman says. “So now he checks in first with Jackie, and she talks to him and looks over his homework. It has made a huge difference, and now he comes into the classroom really calm.”

It’s a typical morning at the Learning Community, the newest of the state’s 11 publicly financed charter schools.

Founded in 2004, the Learning Community serves 280 students in kindergarten through fourth grade, with plans to add fifth grade this fall and sixth grade the following year. The school educates many low-income students — 88 percent are eligible for free or reduced lunch, compared with 38 percent statewide — and has a per-pupil cost thousands below neighboring communities.

The Learning Community ranks among the top 10 highest scoring urban elementary schools in the state, with the added distinction that it claims the highest poverty rate among these high-performing schools.

To balance that, the school reaches out to parents, boasting the highest level of parental involvement of all Rhode Island’s 314 public schools. The school’s 14 classroom teachers, who are not unionized but earn the same as union teachers, put in long hours, including staying after school for weekly meetings and attending two weeks of professional development each August — without additional pay.

How does a relatively new school, run on a lean budget and serving the poorest of the state’s children, manage to get such positive results?

“I can tell you what the difference is between the Learning Community and regular public schools,” says Fran Gallo, superintendent of the Central Falls School Department, who sends administrators and teachers to visit the charter school. “They are child focused while the public system is adult focused. We are not doing our children justice with a system that does not promote who they are and address their needs. At the Learning Community, you see that fully in play every day. Children first. That’s the difference.”

SARAH FRIEDMAN and Meg O’Leary, co-directors of the Learning Community, learned about the challenges facing urban education in the early 2000s, when they both worked for a now-defunct nonprofit that provided professional development in reading and math to teachers in six Providence elementary schools.

“We saw firsthand the obstacles those schools faced,” says O’Leary, “from changes in leadership to an uncoordinated curriculum to a lack of decision making at the building level. Principals had no control over their budget, over their schedule, over who they hired. Can you imagine running a business and having no control over who you hire?”

What they witnessed spurred them to establish their own school. They chose a model that had a short history in Rhode Island but had demonstrated success in urban communities. The first charter school opened in Rhode Island in the mid-1990s and quickly became a flashpoint. Supporters say charters provide an alternative to traditional public schools while detractors say they siphon money from public education.

Through their jobs, Friedman and O’Leary, neither of whom were teachers, visited high-performing urban schools across the country to recruit teachers to provide short-term training in Providence schools. They were impressed by innovative public schools in New York City and by Boston’s pilot schools, which operate like unionized charter schools.

“We started visiting schools that were working well, and we saw what was possible,” Friedman says.

In 2001, having seen several charter schools already open in Rhode Island, Friedman, O’Leary and Marcia Uretsky, who later left the school, applied to the state Department of Education to create a school to serve low-income students in Central Falls, Pawtucket and Providence. For three years, they worked through the department’s application process and spread the word. They went to street festivals, knocked on doors, took out ads on radio and in English- and Spanish-language newspapers.

In 2004, the Learning Community opened with 100 kindergarten and first-grade students in space leased at the Pawtucket YMCA. Today, the school, like most of the state’s other charter schools, uses a lottery to fill its openings and has a wait list of more than 200 students. Unlike most charter schools that rent their buildings, the Learning Community bought theirs in 2006. The school has gradually made the former nursing home on Lincoln Avenue their own — converting a parking lot to a playground and painting each classroom in bright colors.

“I don’t think we believed it would really happen until we opened that first day and the kids all showed up,” Friedman says. “That’s when we believed it.”

The school’s budget — a mixture of federal, state, local funds and some private donations — is about $3.7 million a year. Its per-pupil cost is approximately $11,600. That’s far lower than in Providence ($15,000), Central Falls ($14,900) and Pawtucket ($12,800), all of which have more students with severe learning disabilities, who cost more to educate.

The Learning Community outperformed those three districts on the latest round of state testing, with 59 percent proficient in reading and 54 percent in math.

INSPIRED BY current educational research and the work of high-performing schools, Friedman, O’Leary and Uretsky devised a “three-pronged approach to quality education” — putting equal importance on supporting teachers, students and families.

While much of what the school does seems like good common sense, it is all too rare in some of the state’s public schools.

Teachers collaborate every day, visiting each other’s classrooms and developing lesson plans — during the school day and after. This year, the school hired two veteran teachers to work extensively with classroom teachers. All teachers are evaluated twice a year by outside education consultants.

Literacy lies at the center of all instruction, and teachers assess student progress in reading each week. When a student slips, he or she immediately is placed in small group sessions with a reading specialist. About 25 percent of students flow in and out of these interventions during the school year.

O’Leary and Friedman credit the focus on literacy with the school’s relatively low proportion of students in special education: 13 percent compared with the state average of 19 percent. Several studies of Rhode Island’s exceptionally high special-education rate have pointed to inadequate reading instruction in the lower grades.

The school’s team approach to academics extends to addressing students’ social and emotional needs.

Tuesday afternoons, a child study team, including the school nurse, social worker, speech therapist, psychologist and the directors, discusses problems faced by individual students and strategizes how to address behavior issues. The students’ teachers are also invited to the meetings, and team members occasionally make home visits.

The school’s effort to involve parents starts the moment a student is accepted through the annual spring lottery. Friedman sits down one-on-one with each family — talking in Spanish or English — to learn about the family. Together, Friedman and the parents sign a nonbinding contract that provides a glimpse of what the school and families expect from one another.

“They are individual welcoming meetings, where we talk about their family strengths and their hopes and dreams for their child at the school,” Friedman says. “I lay out the expectations the school has of the families and we tell them what they can expect from us. And we sign a contract.”

ON A RECENT morning, a dozen parents — mostly mothers — enjoy coffee in the lobby and catch up after their kids go to class. A couple of toddlers play in a corner.

Arlene Paulino of Pawtucket says she first heard about the Learning Community on a Spanish-language radio station shortly before it opened. She now has three children at the school: Yarinette, in fourth grade; Francisco, in second; and Aliyheh, in kindergarten.

“I really didn’t like the public school in Pawtucket where my oldest daughter was going,” Paulino says. “The minute I heard the commercial, I took my cell phone out and dialed. I just knew this was what I was looking for.”

Her older children are thriving, reading significantly above grade level. But she also appreciates the way parents have been made a part of the school, including helping out in several areas and being allowed to linger in the café after school begins.

“The crossing guard is a parent, the lunch ladies are parents,” she says. “I love coming here and sitting with the other parents. It’s like a family.” Eugenia Venegas of Pawtucket has volunteered in the classroom and helped organize a baby shower for one of the teachers. She likes being able to pick her children up in their classroom at the end of the day.

At her daughter’s old school, “the kids all lined up outside, and parents couldn’t come in,” says Venegas, who has two children at the Learning Community: Valentina Gutierrez, in fourth grade; and Kevin Gutierrez, in kindergarten.

To help parents, the school schedules parent-teacher conferences around the parents’ work hours, no doubt a factor in the school’s 100-percent parent participation rate. Once a month the school holds a Parent Cafe, an educational and social gathering that allows parents to hear in detail what their children are learning and express concerns. Report cards and letters home are written in English and Spanish.

“From the beginning, part of our mission has been to actively welcome and reach out to families,” Friedman says. “We also believe it’s a parent’s right to be involved in their child’s education.”

But perhaps the most unusual aspect of the Learning Community’s approach to engaging families is the 40-minute meeting to greet new families — and the school-family contract.

A group of parents helped Friedman create the contract, which she and the parents sign at the end of the one-on-one meeting. While students cannot be removed from the school for a family’s failure to comply, Friedman says it helps clarify what is expected.

In the contract, the school promises to provide a “high quality education,” communicate with the parents and provide opportunities for them to “influence school policy and curriculum.” For their part, parents promise to get their child to school on time and well-rested, make sure homework is done, read to their child 10 to 20 minutes a day and attend Parent Cafes.

“It’s just best to be clear about your expectations up front,” Friedman says. “And some people have never been told explicitly what would be helpful.”

ONE TUESDAY afternoon, eight members of the child study team cluster around a table to talk about “J,” a third-grade boy whose name they have shortened to protect his identity in front of a visitor. O’Leary and Friedman run the meeting, attended by the school nurse, the social worker, his classroom teacher, the special-education director, a part-time speech-language pathologist and a part-time child psychologist.

With a high number of the school’s families living in chronic poverty, Friedman and O’Leary devised the team to deal with behavior and emotional issues that can arise.

“So many of our parents are working two to three jobs, so if we see a home situation sort of unraveling, we don’t let it go until these problems prevent the student, and other students, from learning,” O’Leary says. “We are not a social service agency, but we can put the families in touch with resources and people who can help them.”

As the team meets, the boy’s teacher describes the skills she has been working on with him: completing work in a timely manner and treating his fellow students with respect.

“It’s up and down with him trying to do both those things at once,” the teacher says. “So I may have to modify that expectation so he can reach those goals.”

The social worker, Ben Fox, says he and the teacher met with the boy’s parents at their home the previous week. “That’s a big step in communication,” Fox says.

“Let’s brainstorm about some positive language, because I know he sometimes feels like he’s disappointed you,” O’Leary tells the teacher.

“He’s looking for your approval,” Fox agrees.

For the next 15 minutes, the group throws out ideas about how to help the boy, including praising him for good behavior and sending home tips in Spanish to help him remain calm. “Mom’s working the incentives at home, which is nice,” the teacher says.

They agree the boy will be invited to join the “lunch bunch,” a weekly gathering of a small group of students with the speech-language pathologist, and the nurse says she will make sure that a hearing problem is not contributing to a difficulty in following directions.

“We will type up all these ideas and Ben will come around to work with you,” Friedman tells the teacher.

A follow-up meeting is set for two weeks.

CHRISTINE WILTSHIRE, a veteran classroom teacher, sits across the table from first-year teacher Rebeca Filomeno one spring afternoon.

Wiltshiire is one of two experienced teachers assigned this year to work one-on-one with classroom teachers. Called an “instructional coach,” Wiltshire meets with teachers in kindergarten through second grade. Sometimes she spends a whole day with one teacher.

Today, Wiltshire has observed a 40-minute writing lesson Filomeno gave to her second-grade class. Now, just minutes after the lesson, the two are dissecting how it went in an office a few doors down from the classroom. A trained “teaching partner” is reading to Filomeno’s class while the two huddle for a 15-minute “rapid-fire debriefing.”

In the lesson, Filomeno asked her students to insert “mystery words” into short essays, such as “clue,” “suspense” and “mysterious.” Now, Wiltshire and Filomeno discuss how the students paid attention, how they moved from task to task and what Filomeno could have done better.

“I thought your connection was great and you made the lesson purposeful,” Wiltshire says. “You explained why it’s important to do vocabulary and add it into writing. I like that you gave them a list of the words.”

But at the end of the lesson, students jostled one another as they passed in their folders and fidgeted. “There was a jumble at the folder box,” Filomeno admits. “Maybe next time you could assign table managers at each table and ask the kids to put the folders in the middle,” Wiltshire suggests before they agree to meet again the next day.

“I don’t know what I’d do without her,” Filomeno says. “At this point, we are getting more into curriculum. But as a new teacher, she has helped me so much with classroom management. She’s given me tips on how to set up the classroom, how to stay organized.”

Wiltshire taught for five years at the Paul Cuffee Charter School in Providence before coming to the Learning Community in 2006 as a first-grade teacher. She has been a teacher for less than a decade. But at the Learning Community, where most of the teachers are relatively new, she is a veteran voice. Last fall, she agreed to coach her colleagues full-time.

“The culture of this school is that I am here to support you and you’re OK with me in your classroom and I’m not here to embarrass you,” she says. “And we work hard on doing assessments, so teachers can figure out what their students didn’t learn.”

While it costs two teacher salaries in a school with only 14 teachers, O’Leary says the instructional coaches are essential.

“An investment in one teacher is an investment in not only the 20 students in front of him or her, but all the students that person will ever teach in his or her career,” she says. “I can’t really see any more direct way of raising the level of student performance.”

AT THE CLOSE of school one recent day, Sarah Friedman stands in the sun saying goodbye to students and parents.

“Bye, Walter,” she says, touching the top of the boy’s head as he walks past her. “Matthew had a great day today,” she tells a mother.

Parents pick up their children. Buses depart for Central Falls, Pawtucket and Providence. The school nurse, Liz Andersen, stands in the shade near the front door chatting with parents and helping younger students line up for their buses.

Friedman arrived at 8 a.m. and will stay until 6 — a typical day for her. “The first three years, they were all 14-hour days,” she says. “It was brutal.”

Once the buses pull away, Friedman heads to her office, where a teacher waits to discuss a student who had misbehaved on a field trip. They decide the boy will not attend the next one, unless an extra adult can accompany the group.

Then Friedman begins preparing for three meetings with parents of students who will start this fall.

Co-director Meg O’Leary wanders into Friedman’s office. O’Leary handles the school’s budget, the running of the building, fundraising and curriculum development, while Friedman focuses on reaching out to families, overseeing students’ social and emotional needs and keeping the front office running smoothly. After four years, the co-directors finally feel they have their sea legs. Their days are still long, but less chaotic than last year. Changes they’ve made along the way — hiring a full-time social worker, dedicating two full-time teachers to coaching, training “teaching partners” to do more than teaching assistants do in regular public schools — seem to be working.

But building the school they dreamed about is not an act, but rather a process that unfolds every day.

Both remember feeling angry seeing parents excluded at other public schools they worked in.

“We wanted people to feel like this was their home, and that this was our school together,” O’Leary says. “When we opened this school, we went into their homes and we met them on the street and we looked them in the eye and said, ‘If you will trust us, we promise you we will build a school that will honor who you are as a family, that you will feel at home here and share equally in this work, and we will provide a phenomenal education to your child.’

“It became very personal to us because we made this promise to every single person.”

jjordan@projo.com