With the help of a grant from the Maine DOE, the school has reconstructed a trail system behind the school, which winds through the woods to an outdoor classroom perched on a dock above a wetland.
The project emerged from the minds of two educators – Jennifer Swain and Cristina Sirois - who saw the value in outdoor education for their students’ health and social-emotional well-being. The school says the new project will ensure the outdoors are accessible to ALL students, and will open up new opportunities for community partnerships. “I got to watch as [Swain] and I shared students, how excited, how passionate, and how amazing her (outdoor) program was going, and I wanted in on it too," said Sirois, a life skills teacher, in a DOE video. “My students are often non-ambulant, come to me with lots of traumatic challenges...but things that have just been challenging for them. And of course, they probably needed this more than anybody else.”