Tour our Space
185 Putnam Pike Harmony, RI
Our Small Group Space
Snack & Recess operates out of a studio in Harmony, Rhode Island. Our location is 20 minutes from Providence by car and convenient to 14 local elementary schools. We lovingly call our studio a "one room school house" because it is quite literally a sunny office in a renovated elementary school. Our address is 185 Putnam Pike. When you pull into the lot, you'll see the Harmony Library on your left and our school building on your right. Snack and Recess shares the renovated school building with a child care center, several offices, and several other small businesses.
What address do I put in my GPS?
185 Putnam Pike in Glocester, RI.
Where do I drop off? Is there a waiting room?
The teacher will meet students on the steps that face Putnam Pike building two or three minutes before the start of a session. In order to be as quiet as possible to respect our neighbors, kids will say goodbye to their families outside and walk into tutoring studio with the teacher.
Is there parking? What door do we enter?
There is ample parking. The closest spots are in front of the building in the drop-off loop. There are also spots between the school building and the Harmony Library, as well as behind the building. To enter the studio, walk up the front steps, enter the building, and come into the first door on the left.
Where are the restrooms?
Restrooms are located around the corner door down from the tutoring studio. Restrooms are open when the building is open; please lock the door behind you.
Why do you meet students outside?
Two reasons. First, transitions can be difficult for our youngest students and long goodbyes can make transitions more difficult. We've come to appreciate the routine of greeting families, waving goodbye, and walking into our tutoring space. This means our teachers can connect with families daily but transitions are quick enough to protect students' class time.
Second, our studio shares a hallway with several businesses that need a quiet setting, so adults and siblings of students are not able to wait in the hallway or in the studio during sessions. Luckily, we share a parking lot with the Harmony library, which has plenty of indoor and outdoor seating, a playground, and restrooms. The library and its outdoor spaces are a wonderful place to wait before you pick your child up.
When can I see the tutoring studio?
On the first day of class, parents and families will come inside for a quick tour of the building and tutoring studio. We also have a virtual tour we will link here here and host open houses at the beginning of each season. We'd love for you to join us!
Supporting Students in this Moment:
The Town's Educational Needs Have Changed, but the Building on the Corner of Cooper Hill has A Storied History of Learning
A Storied-History of Learning: Rising to the Challenge
According to the Rhode Island Historical Preservation Commission, 185 Putnam Pike has been a center for learning for centuries. After the Revolutionary War, the town was home to many wooden, one-room school houses, including 11 that operated concurrently in 1828.
Around one hundred years after that, Chepachet School -- later renamed Adah S. Hawkins Elementary School -- was built to replace one of these one-room schoolhouses at the intersection of Cooper Hill and Putnam Pike.
The building, designed by Providence architect Albert Harkness, was lauded for its upgrades in plumbing and closet space. It is a single story brick building with a multiple-gable-roof in a "modernized neo-Georgian design" (1980). Historical documents describe the semicircular entry, the building's belfry, the large, brick, exterior chimneys; and "flanking wings at each side, at right angles to the main building" on a small grassy lot.
The construction of this building in Harmony signaled a new era of schooling in America. Gone were the scattered, one-room schoolhouses. Representative John E. Fogarty, referred back to this shift in his 1962 speech at the school.
"The consolidated school is a stepping stone into the new American age. The little red schoolhouse belongs nowhere today except in our sentimental memories. There was a time when a fourth-grade education was the top goal of many, when a high school diploma was a luxury, and when college was only for the elite. Education has a far different connotation in our national life today. More than half of our high school graduates go on to college or to some kind of higher specialized training. It is almost a must."
Fogarty describes a "tremendous" educational challenge of the 1960s as a "challenge to American communities, such as Harmony, and to consolidated school districts, such as Foster-Glocester." He explains, "You can give education many directions — once it is grounded upon the basic subjects, which must be well taught and well learned in the elementary grades. Education can be academic, with a view to college and graduate school. It can be in the direction of commerce and business...[or] for specialized, technical skill...The new approach to schooling — the consolidated school — can make this wide sweep of education possible."
Fogarty closes his speech at the school by honoring Adah Hawkins, the building's namesake:\
"Some of us fret about education "problems". Mrs. Hawkins did not regard education as a problem, but rather as a challenge. It is not unlike the challenges which earlier generations of Americans faced with imagination, energy and phenomenal success in developing our country's natural resources. Our greatest resource in this new age is the American mind. We can succor it — or starve it — by our measure of vision."
At Snack and Recess, we like to think Mrs. Hawkins would be proud to know her tradition of stepping towards challenges continues in our little studio, which we believe is located in her former principal's office. The history of this space reminds us that education takes many forms, and the best of those forms directly face the challenges of the moment we find ourselves in.
Fogarty, J. E. (1962, February 12). Remarks by Representative John E. Fogarty. https://pcdc.providence.edu/_flysystem/repo-bin/2021-05/islandora_28864.pdf.
RHODE ISLAND HISTORICAL PRESERVATION COMMISSION. (1980). Historic and Architectural Resources of Glocester, Rhode Island: A Preliminary Report. In https://preservation.ri.gov/sites/g/files/xkgbur406/files/pdfs_zips_downloads/survey_pdfs/glocester.pdf.
