For the week of March 13 - 19, 2002

Community School’s outdoor program challenges students

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By DANA DUGAN
Express Staff Writer

Time for school—get your back pack on, and make sure you have hiking boots, sun screen, insect repellent and water.

Say what?

Tenth grade students from The Community School, who participated in an Outdoor Education excursion on the Washington coast, are from left to right: Fraser Donald, Kira Tenney, Ash Higgins, Alysse Gelet, Brennan Rego, Phil Huss (10th grade English teacher) and Joan Baumgardner. Courtesy photo

This is what it can be like when an outdoor education is part of your school’s curriculum.

In our area, we are blessed with plenty of the great outdoor environs in which to teach our children well, and schools willing to accept the challenge.

Outdoor education has long been understood to be of benefit to students, no matter what grade. Not only does it provide opportunities for students to become environmentally conscious citizens, but experiential learning activities bring students together and encourage them to grow both academically and interpersonally.

In our area, the Wood River Middle School annually takes sixth graders on a four-day environmental camp, where environmental issues are stressed, hands-on lab work is performed on site, surrounding land is explored and kids bond while learning how to be responsible about their environment.

The Community School in Sun Valley takes the outdoor education process to another level, requiring middle and upper students to go on three-week long excursions and several weekend trips a year. Outdoor Program Director Tom Boley has been with The Community School for 12 years. He said "stretching the comfort circle and learning how to deal with adversity" is a big part of the program’s aim.

It’s one of the largest such programs in the Northwest.

Lower school students also participate by visiting local habitats on day trips, and in local nature explorations. By the fifth grade, students embark on their first overnight trip to Hagerman to learn camping skills and study the Snake River Plain Aquifer.

These are social bench marks, Boley says. "It’s a time-out from challenges in the academic program. And special relationships are fostered by how much time we spend together."

Boley speaks about personal development, self-esteem building, cooperation and social skills as being just as important as the environmental education. All the trips are "woven in to serve those skills," says Boley.

Students also handle the cooking of meals and purifying of their own water on these trips. Many excursions integrate ages, so that the older students help out with the younger. "You get more responsible as you get older. We help the little kids set up their tents and cook—we teach them the ropes," said Sarah Behan, a senior at The Community School.

Hands-on experiential discovery also connects the students with classroom work. For instance, the eighth grade this year is studying the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and will follow part of the Corps of Discovery’s trail later this spring. Last year, eleventh graders read Edward Abbey’s "Desert Solitaire," while exploring the Needles in Canyonlands National Park in southeastern Utah.

Behan said the program is "One of the things I’ll miss most when I go to college. I’m never going to have this again. It’s hard to organize after you graduate."

Well, yes, but the kind of things these students do is what we adults pay a fortune for when we travel—adventure, exotic locales, history, science and thrills all tied up in one package.

There is even an urban experience for Community School students, which sounds a bit bizarre, but these kids have mostly grown up in the mountains. For them, the urban experience is the unknown, not the commonplace.

While in Boise, for instance, they’ll sit on the streets to "simulate homelessness," work in soup kitchens and try to come up with ways to find food without begging. In one case, a group ate the samples at Albertson’s, and another offered to clean a diner in exchange for french fries and milkshakes.

Most of the school’s trips focus on the outdoors, though, with such activities as rafting, climbing, mountain biking, canoeing, avalanche safe camping, as well as trips to yurts, and visits to the Bruneau Sand Dunes, the City of Rocks, Yellowstone and Craters of the Moon. "We go to places we’d never go to obviously," said Patrick Sherwood, a senior.

Each grade has its highlight trip: winter camping in homemade snow caves in ninth grade, a study of marine environment on the Washington coastline in 10th grade, a 48-hour solo in Utah in 11th grade, and, in 12th grade, seniors take a two-week senior quest—a requisite for graduation.

While some form of outdoor education has existed for years in the private sector, more and more schools are jumping on the trend to provide experiential education, Boley said.

"It’s another arena where the students are pushed."

 

The Idaho Mountain Express is distributed free to residents and guests throughout the Sun Valley, Idaho resort area community. Subscribers to the Idaho Mountain Express will read these stories and others in this week's issue.