It’s 8:30 a.m. at The Mountain School in Vershire, and the halls of the school are quiet.
There are no students lounging by their lockers or rushing to classes. Instead, the 45 high school juniors from around the United States who live, work and study at the semester-long program are piled into the center of the school’s dining hall, listening to one of their peers read the morning news.
It’s been nearly three months since the spring session of The Mountain School began. It’s apparent that the students, who have taken four months off from their regular schools, have settled in easily. As the teenagers — sprawled in a comfortable pile and dressed for farm work — listen to the announcements for the day, there’s no evidence of cliques or factions. The students are their own single group.
One of them, Emma Glazer, 16, of Thetford, has a theory for why this school creates a tight bond among its students. “Unlike most day schools,” Glazer said, “nobody goes home at the end of the day to their own lives. We’re with each other 24/7, and that creates the need to work out our differences as quickly as possible.”
Glazer, one of three Upper Valley students attending The Mountain School, has become good friends with the two others, Elisha Mattoon, 17, of Chelsea; and Josie Bourne, 16, of Lebanon. All three applied in early 2015 to attend and were among the 90 students chosen out of the 220 students nationwide who applied for one of the two semesters offered.
After announcements, students head to a morning’s worth of classes. Each course taught at the school meets or exceeds the requirements for honors classes and is geared toward what students are learning outside of classes — reading, working and respecting the farm and forests surrounding the school.
At the beginning of Bruce Brough’s environmental science class, he points out the window to the surrounding mountains. “Today,” he proclaims, “we’re going to learn how these mountains came to be.”
In French teacher Kareen Obydol-Alexandre’s room, students are writing essays about the three-day solo expedition each student took earlier in the week.
Once classes are finished, students ramble into the dining hall, where they are served food mostly grown at the school. Mattoon inhales his lunch (salad, barbecue ribs, a spinach-and-egg casserole, a buttermilk biscuit and a banana whoopie pie) before rushing to the kitchen to wash dishes and package leftovers — his assigned chore for the past two weeks. From feeding the farm animals at the school to shutting off the lights in the dining hall at night, each student is assigned a different chore every few weeks.
A three-hour break from classes after lunch is a time for farm work and some study. A hard-hatted group carrying axes and saws strides into the woods with a few faculty members in tow to spend the afternoon gathering wood to fuel the boiler. Another few teenagers labor to clean out the pig pens.
Today, Mattoon, and Bourne, along with a few classmates, march into the woods for their weekly science hike. At the beginning of the semester, each student chooses a piece of the land that surrounds the school and is given time each week to return to the spot, sketch out the natural features and research the land’s past. Working as a group, they wander the gently sloping forest, keeping an eye out for evidence of previous uses — a shelter or grazing land, for example — and helping each other cross streams. While looking for a boundary marker, the group breaks into song, belting out a pop tune.
“I know I live pretty close to The Mountain School,” Bourne says to her classmates on the hike, “but I’m learning just as much about this area as you all are.”
Several more hours of class work and study time await the group after their hike back through the greening hills to campus, but everyone seems more energized by the afternoon spent outdoors and the time with friends. This sense of community and conservation has been the spirit of the school, since its inception in 1962.
Sarah Priestap can be reached at spriestap@vnews.com or 603-727-3230.