Those fortunate enough to be one of 20 successful applicants to School District 47’s Coast Mountain Academy (CMA) consider the outdoor education program to be a real school, according to current student Tao Werner.
“It is school,” said Werner, 17, who hails from Cumberland on Vancouver Island. “I don’t think there’s one version of school. You learn from a lot of different schools in your lifetime.”
Werner said whether someone finds their way through homeschooling, public schooling or private schooling, what is most important is that they learn the best way for them.
There is not a day with CMA when he is not learning, even from something as simple as a spoon, he said.
“We had this spoon project early on in the year,” said Werner. “We had to carve this wooden utensil, but there is no manual. There’s no step-by-step to do it.”
Making a spoon does not seem like much in the beginning, but Werner said he is building foundational skills.
School District 47 board of education trustee Jeanette Scott said the CMA program originated in 2002. She added that Brooks Secondary School counsellor Jim Palm, Terracentric Coastal Adventures co-owner Hugh Prichard and the late school board trustee Geoff Clarke worked hard to bring outdoor education and the Outdoor Learning Centre to Powell River.
In 2002, Brooks Outdoor Adventure Travel and Tourism Course (BOATT) was introduced. Scott said it was formed from summer programs that had been run in the district, focused on outdoor education and included first nations studies, team building and leadership.
“BOATT offered training and certification in a wide variety of adventure tourism areas including operation of small crafts, wilderness and avalanche survival, operation of VHF, indoor and outdoor climbing, kayaking, canoeing, sailing, scuba diving and sport fishing,” said Scott.
Course instructor Ryan Barfoot took over the BOATT program in 2004 and transformed it into CMA.
What and where these senior level students learn is unconventional, according to Barfoot, but the ultimate goal is to build upon basic skills, such as carving a spoon, to shape future leaders.
“If your idea of school is something that provides students with real, applicable skills that will help them regardless of whatever path they follow, then CMA makes sense,” said Barfoot.
CMA’s focus is on leadership, which applies whether a person is the CEO of a company, a business owner, doctor, lawyer, teacher, plumber or mechanic. Leadership is a skill and quality recognized regardless of the workplace, said Barfoot.
Powell River native and CMA graduate Ricci Leitch now attends Thompson Rivers University.
“I learned more in those five months than I did in my other 11 years of education,” said Leitch. “You learn a lot about yourself and how to deal with other people, and that’s super important.”
In addition to developing leadership skills, the program focuses on decision making, problem solving and the importance of teamwork.
“Going through it, the group ends up working as a team and you have to work through different things together,” said Leitch. “You learn a lot about each other.”
One of the more curious things about CMA, according to Leitch, is having “nature names,” which students choose themselves or other students suggest for them. Werner’s moniker is Salad; Leitch is known as Aspen.
Leitch knew Powell River’s outdoors, but entered the program because she said she wanted to learn more.
“I love the outdoors, but I wanted to experience it at a deeper level,” she said.
Since choosing her nature name, Leitch said she has learned more about trees than she ever would have in a book.
