HARRISON — None of the 12 students at The Boxberry School ever have to use the excuse, “The dog ate my homework.”
That is because there is no homework, at least in the traditional sense, at the private kindergarten through sixth-grade school based at Fernwood Cove girls’ camp next to Island Pond.
“There aren’t a lot of ties to performance and academic homework load,” Kimberly Leighton, one of the school’s two teachers, said. “The studies show that there isn’t really a pro and a con, it just kind of sits there as far as being relevant or not.
Leighton teaches alongside Maria Yanni and Administrator Seal Rossignol, who also works with children in the nontraditional school.
“Kids can request homework and some kids request homework. . . . It’s interesting sometimes when you don’t have it, they want it. . . . That’s been great so far – we haven’t seen any academic negligence, we haven’t seen anything bad,” she said.
Besides the rare student who asks for homework, there are some school-related activities the children can do at home. There was a home-based project earlier this year called “green innovations for the future” where each student – even kindergartners – have to pitch their idea to their fellow students and teachers. There are also reading logs that are voluntary.
“It’s not forced, it’s not mandated and sometimes when you take that out of the equation, kids are more excited to do it on their own,” Leighton said about reading at home.
“The kids have a lot of choice,” Rossignol added. “There’s obviously structure but there’s a lot of choice within that.”
The Boxberry School moved from Oxford to Fernwood Cove off Island Pond Road for this school year and will be there for at least the next five years. Teachers and students alike have settled into their new digs well.
The large room downstairs that serves as the dance studio during the summer has been transformed into a temporary classroom, the staff lounge doubles as the cafeteria and activities room, and the back room with wall-to-wall shelving is the library.
Fairy houses created earlier this year line the hallway, as do student artwork and snippets from the 100 Days of Kindness unit.
Rossignol said the goal is to have enough students enrolled by next school year so they can have two classrooms with students. Currently, all students are mixed together. Sometimes those in kindergarten through second grade and those in third through sixth grade are placed into two groups.
“These students get a lot of individual attention. There’s a lot of collaborative work that happens,” she said. “It’s great if you want that small environment with that low teacher-student ratio.”
Boxberry students start their day different than most students enrolled in public schools. They begin with meditation – whether it’s guided, Tibetan monks chanting, bell ringing or another form. Yoga is often incorporated into their day. Leighton said her students are exposed to many more subjects than public school students. And she should know, as her three children and two stepchildren attend public schools because she and her husband want them taught by someone else.
Subjects run the gamut from the more traditional math, science, social studies and literacy to French, karate, performing and visual arts, exploring Fernwood Cove and the newly created forest playground and conservation.
They learn responsibility by caring for Leighton’s rabbit, Caramel, and sometimes her Yorkie, Moxie, comes to school with her, much to the children’s delight. The teachers also have the students hooked on juicing, where they bring in their own fruits and vegetables to create a delicious and nutritious liquid.
“They love it,” Leighton said. “I don’t get a break because I’m the juice queen.”
Students also learn the importance of composting by getting rid of their food scraps in the camp’s compost pile, and they can play a variety of sports, including archery, gymnastics, tennis and basketball.
On a recent Wednesday – specials day, which is also open to home-schooled children – Rossignol test drives a demonstration to create clouds inside a plastic bottle using a match and water droplets. She tries it several times but the clouds aren’t forming. Thankfully she has a backup activity.
After the students return from their second short recess of the day, they don their house slippers, in this case school slippers, and gather in the lounge. They sit at two different tables according to age and Rossignol hands out cotton balls to create cloud forms.
She warns them to ration their cotton since they won’t be given any more. As they work on the project, the students share their favorite thing about attending an alternative school.
“The forest playground,” 6-year-old Jacobi Boyce said, “because you get to play with wood and stuff.”
Ten-year-old Willa Ramos-Wolter comes over from the older students’ table to excitedly share that her favorite thing is also the forest playground.
Sylvie Gill, 8, has a number of things she loves about The Boxberry School.
“My favorite thing at school is probably math and literacy and probably karate and going to the forest playground,” she said.
Nearing the end of their cloud project, Rossignol asks Leighton if the students have time to do their chores. There is, and while this may seem like a drag for most students, those at Boxberry are eager to help out.
“Vacuuming, vacuuming, vacuuming!” Jacobi exclaimed before running off to fetch the vacuum.
As for Leighton, she couldn’t imagine teaching in any other setting. She previously owned two private schools in Portland and Gorham for young children before teaching at Head Start in Oxford and Augusta and then coming to Boxberry. This is her second year at Boxberry and she now considers it home.
“It just seems like it’s the way teaching should be. . . . I love the sense of community here. It almost feels like that one-room schoolhouse kind of feel,” she said. “You can really track (the students’) growth not only academically but as a person. It’s really neat to see them evolve.”
Rossignol noted that if a family lives in Albany or Mason townships, a child can attend The Boxberry School for virtually no cost because those townships have school choice and will be reimbursed by the state. Families are still responsible for the deposit, but tuition should be covered by the state.
For more information about The Boxberry School, visit www.boxberryschool.org/ or www.facebook.com/TheBoxberrySchool/ or call 207-743-9700.
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