Students gain outdoors skills, time at home

The towering silver maple is one of those perfect trees of summer, the kind that beckons kids to climb into its arms and lazily contemplate the world below. But this is a school day, and this is a schoolyard. Yet the tree is getting lots of attention.

Ropes dangle everywhere, and from those ropes dangle teens practicing their rappelling skills.

Nearby, other students climb up the sides of a school building and fire escape - training ground for wilderness boulders and granite walls they tackle on weekends.

This is the University School of Colorado Springs, a kindergarten through 12th-grade program with tough college-prep academics, a Christian foundation and a belief that older students learn responsibility and leadership through adventure challenges in far-flung canyon lands.

The private school is a hybrid, combining traditional classroom instruction with home-schooling, says administrator Jeff Cooper. The school's 91 students spend two to three days a week on the campus in Old Colorado City, and then stay at home on alternate days, when parents continue the instruction and monitor homework.

"My public school friends are jealous because I only go to class three days a week," says Clayton Wyatt, 14, who has just climbed out of the tree. "But it's not all free time. I work hard at home, too."

He was home-schooled for four years; now he and two of his siblings attend University School.

"It's the best of both worlds for us," says his mother, Jennifer Wyatt. "I love that they are home two days a week. And it takes the pressure off us, not having to come up with the entire curriculum ourselves and keep grades and all that like we did with home-schooling."

She also likes the spiritual mentoring Clayton gets in the after-school Bible groups. "He sees other older boys and men who are spiritual and are still cool," she says.

School away from home-school

The school is one of 40 nationwide affiliated with the National Association of University-Model Schools, or NAUMS. It is an outgrowth of Grace Preparatory Academy in Arlington, Texas, founded in 1993 by a group of frustrated home-school parents.

"They hit the wall with calculus and physics and so set up a system of part-time teachers," says Barbara Freeman, executive director of NAUMS. The association has grown from 12 schools in 2002 and now has 5,000 students.

Freeman acknowledges that some home-school advocates don't agree with their philosophy of combining traditional school with home-schooling.

"They don't like the idea of any formal schooling at all," she says. "But others like the opportunity to have a ready-made educational structure and support, and still be a co-teacher and have the gift of spending more time with their children. And they often can pinpoint strengths and weaknesses that overwhelmed public-schoolteachers don't see."

The schools are nonprofit and independent, but are certified by NAUMS, which provides educational and technical support. Tuition is less than that at many private schools.

At the Colorado Springs school, tuition is $2,305 for elementary students and about $3,100 for students in seventh through 12th grades. The lower grades have full-time teachers, but the upper grades rely on part-time teachers with particular skills.

The school, which started three years ago, is working on its accreditation, which will take about two years. But Cooper says students have not had trouble transferring to public schools or getting into college.

Life lessons

While it's the rigorous academics that prepare kids for college, it's the rigorous outdoors experience that prepares them for life, advocates say. Consider Clayton Wyatt's experience. He and his father were working out at a gym when his dad had to go to the emergency room because he was dehydrated.

"Clayton called me from the hospital and was supercalm and told me not to worry," Jennifer Wyatt says. "He was so level-headed. He even warned me not to speed on my way to the hospital. He learned all that from adventure class - how to think and not lose your head in an emergency. That is huge."

Students can enroll in adventure classes once they reach seventh grade. The classroom itself has three big tree trunks attached to the walls, so students can practice tying knots and other rope techniques. They learn safety, first aid, geography, map reading and other skills.

Approximately a half-dozen trips a year are included in the tuition, and there are four additional family trips to places such as Yellowstone National Park. Because the students aren't in the classroom on Fridays or Mondays, it's an ideal schedule for the excursions to destinations in Colorado and Utah.

"When they are dangling off a 100-foot cliff, they learn a lot about themselves," says Cooper, a former youth pastor who also worked for a university-model school in California.

Being in the outdoors also is a natural way to integrate faith into their lives, he says.

"The students bond with all the teamwork required on the trips, and in the evening camped under the stars, there are a lot of serious talks about God."

But they don't have to wander far for the outdoors experience. They have the schoolyard tree.

Tava Reese, 15, has just descended from it.

"I've always been an outdoor girl," she says. "It's just awesome. It's sort of scary sometimes, and you get scratches sometimes, but they just prove you can do it."

-

Call the writer at 636-0371.

DETAILS

University School of Colorado Springs fall registration is under way.
Where: 2713 W. Cucharras St.
Phone: 302-3751
Online: uscs.phpsitehost.com