D  e  s  e  r  t     E  x  p  o  s  u  r  e     July 2005

Teaching Outside the Box

Aldo Leopold High School, Grant County's first charter school, aims to create a different learning environment—with the natural environment at its core.

By David A. Fryxell

The principal is wearing shorts, sandals, a T-shirt and a Yankees cap, and arrives accompanied by his dog, which he jokingly says is named "Aldo Leopold"—as in Aldo Leopold High School, Silver City's new public charter school that will open in August. The future administrative offices are a mobile classroom, labeled "A-7," behind La Plata Middle School; the high school's classrooms will be two similar structures at Silver High School. Inside "A-7" are two lunchroom-style tables, a small stack of metal folding chairs, one school desk with an orange plastic chair, a couple of file cabinets and a small whiteboard dwarfed by an otherwise blank wall.

Modest though the setup may be, to the parents and others who've labored to bring about Grant County's first charter school—and the first charter high school in this corner of the state—this is a dream come true, some six years in the making.

Charter school director Jerry Boswell.

Principal Jerry Boswell—his official title is "director"—is a newcomer to this undertaking, being hired as the school's first employee just this summer. A teacher for 23 years who has master's degrees in school administration and education, he's been teaching physical education at Silver City's traditional high school for 15 years. His wife was involved in writing the Aldo Leopold school curriculum, and her enthusiasm proved contagious. So now here he is, two years before being able to retire, deciding, "Let's roll the dice—why not?" When he gets done here talking about the charter school, he's walking down to Silver High to sign his resignation from his old job. No turning back now.

"As Silver City grows, an increasing percentage of families are looking for nontraditional approaches to education for their kids," Boswell says, thoughtfully scratching his bushy beard and adjusting his Yankees cap. "We hope that Aldo Leopold will be able to serve those families."

Janet Gilchrist, spokesperson for the charter school's governing council, has two children, ages 8 and 10, but laughingly says that she expects by the time they're ready to enroll Aldo Leopold will be so popular they won't be able to get in—"so it's completely altruistic!" Enrollment, which is not limited to the Silver Consolidated Schools district, is by lottery among interested students. The initial freshman and sophomore classes admitted this year will each have 30 students, with the same number being added annually in 2006 and 2007 for a total of 120. In the first lottery on May 24, 31 students applied and were assigned preference by drawing out of a hat (actually, a paper bag); subsequent lotteries are June 28 and July 26.

"The school just organically arose out of the needs of the community," Gilchrist says. "The point is to serve some population that isn't fully served by the existing schools."

Under New Mexico's 1999 Charter School Act, charter schools are public schools, authorized by the local district but accountable to the state public-education department. Charter schools receive tax money based on the number of students they enroll, and must meet all the requirements—licensing, accessibility, the works—of any other public school. According to Gilchrist, New Mexico now has 58 charter schools, heavily concentrated in the Albuquerque area. Las Cruces has two charter middle schools, she says, and Deming has a charter school in the application stage.

Each charter school takes a different approach to education. As the name implies—Aldo Leopold was of course the "father of wildlife management," and was instrumental in designating the Gila National Forest as a wilderness area in 1924—Aldo Leopold High School will emphasize the environment and education that takes advantage of the area's natural resources.

"We'll take an interdisciplinary approach to education." Boswell explains, "enabling kids to use all the specific content areas in projects that apply to real-life situations. The kids will learn to be free thinkers, to identify strands of knowledge and essential questions about the problem. They'll use all their academic tools to explore and research."

They might do this exploration while out backpacking or touring an archaeological dig, where the activities could range from researching a report to acting out a dramatization of the place's past. This curriculum has been codified in what Boswell calls "an 841-page masterpiece."

"We'll use the natural resources we have here as the foundation for the learning process," he goes on. "From a political perspective, you can draw lines about the environment, but who in Silver City is not an 'environmentalist' in some way—whether it's hiking, fishing, hunting, studying birds? To not tap into the natural resources around here would be a misapplication of an approach to education. We're next door to one of the largest wilderness areas in the United States—it's awesome. Why not make that part of your program to study from? It'd be crazy not to!"

But don't get the idea, as some rumors in the community have it, that Aldo Leopold will be "an environmentalist school," training high schoolers to release wolves or spike trees or somesuch. Gilchrist says, "That's not the case at all. We'll teach kids how to think—not what to think."

Nor is the charter school intended as a dumping ground for the district's undesirables. Boswell says, "This will be a rigorous academic environment. This is not a school for slouches—make no mistake. This is not an alternative school for problem students or for kids who don't want to use their brains."

It is, however, what Boswell happily calls "a renegade operation." Forget bells ringing to toll the end of a period, or neatly compartmentalized classes by subject area. "To facilitate this kind of learning environment, a school has to be extremely flexible in scheduling to allow the kids to use these community resources," he says. "A traditional public school couldn't really implement this to the fullest, with their pretty rigid scheduling. In our setting, if the kids have to go on Saturday and Sunday, well, we'll give them Monday and Tuesday off. It's totally flexible."

Such an approach requires teachers to match, and thus far the school's organizers have been thrilled with the interest in what will initially be four full-time-equivalent teaching positions. (Those might be broken up into a combination of full- and part-time hires.) "We have stacks of applications from highly qualified, fabulous educators," says Gilchrist.

"We're skimming the cream of the teachers," Boswell puts in. "The quality of teachers is super high."

Students enrolled in the charter school won't have to sacrifice the extracurricular activities associated with "regular" high school life. The law requires the "mother district" to allow charter-school students to participate in its sports programs, band and so forth.

The district is also required to make available any empty space, which is how the charter school got its mobile classrooms. Some charter schools have had to hunt for such opportunities, but Gilchrist says, "to its credit, the school district called and told us about these rooms."

She adds, "The school district is probably not wild about the idea of a charter school, but we have a good relationship with them—one of the best in the state."

And the creation of a charter school is not intended as a criticism of the area's schools—more a recognition that "one size fits all" doesn't apply to education. Boswell likens it to teaching reading: Some kids learn best with phonics, others with a "whole language" approach. "Kids learn differently," he says. "Some succeed in a large-group environment with compartmentalized subjects. For other kids, there's no place in that system for them to be a star—but they're awesome kids. In a different environment, they'd blossom."

Gilchrist knows families who previously have moved away from Silver City when their children reached a certain age, in order to find those different academic environments. Part of Aldo Leopold's mission is to create a place for those kids, right here.

Someday that might include a physical place for the charter school it can call its own. The organizers have already met with the owner of a potential building, but any such site would need to be made to meet stringent public-school criteria. In the meantime, they're eager to start classes in their makeshift space on August 11.

"This whole thing is an unpredictable start-up," says Boswell. "That's what makes it a challenge. That's why I'm here. Whatever comes down the pipe, we'll have to deal with it. But with all the quality people who are involved in this, I don't see how it can fail."

David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure.

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