Located in the historic mills of Somersworth NH, the Charles Ott Academy of Strafford Learning Center is a NH Department of Education approved special education program serving students in grades 9-12.  The program is approved for two 3-hour sessions per day; each session allows up to 8 students.

COA is a school designed to meet the unique needs of struggling learners through small class sizes (1:3 staff to student ratio) and programming focused on meeting each student where they’re at.  We at Charles Ott Academy believe every student can achieve success.  Because we are a small school, we are able to personalize a student’s programming.

All staff at COA have a shared goal to support students in their path to high school graduation.  This is accomplished by providing a dynamic and innovative academic program that relates to real life occurrences and includes hands-on learning opportunities. We maintain a high standard for student academic engagement, we do understand that academics alone do not prepare young adults for life beyond high school.  We provide a high level of counseling support to promote social/emotional learning, and integrate life skills instruction into the everyday curriculum in order to assist our students in finding more than academic success alone.