What is the Mountain School?
The Student Experience
Four months is a significant portion of your time in high school. In exchange for half of your junior year, the Mountain School offers a unique educational experience with a dynamic, engaging, land-based program. You’ll have opportunities to challenge yourself and grow as a student, a friend, a leader, and a person. You’ll understand the world and your place in it in a new way.
The days here are long and the weeks slip by quickly. If you’re open to it, you’ll find meaning in everything: washing dishes, walks through the woods with your friends, the feeling of your hands in soil, daily chores, and collaboratively deciding how we spend our time together. By the end of four months, you’ll be intimately familiar with the land, your friends, your dorm, the faculty, and yourself. You’ll have an experience that you can carry with you wherever you go.
A Week at the Mountain School
A week in the life of a student at the Mountain School is filled with learning, reflection, connection, and fun. Days start with breakfast and morning meeting and then continue with combinations of the following:
Academic classes
The Mountain School Seminar
Commons Work Periods
Outdoor Program or Science Hike
Chores and Dish Crew
Student-planned Saturday night activities (think Farm Olympics, karaoke, Capture the Flag…)
Affinity group meetings
Field trips… and much more!
Core Curriculum
Our curricular freedom as an independent semester school is an opportunity to offer a unique and dynamic program that responds to the current moment and is rooted in this physical place. The Core Curriculum consists of essential programming in which students are required to participate: the Academic Program, the Outdoor Program, and the Commons Work Program. Click the links below to read more about each of the three programs.
In addition to up to 3 courses of your choosing, all students are enrolled in Honors English, Honors Environmental Studies, and TMS Seminar.
In Outdoor Program, students develop skills necessary to travel safely and comfortably outside, to cultivate and deepen a reciprocal relationship with the natural world, and become intimately familiar with our 418-acre campus.
The Commons Work Program provides an opportunity for students to experiment with their relationship to the work of taking care of a place as a daily communal responsibility. Commons Work includes chores, Farm Crew, washing dishes, and Wood Crew.
A required course for all students, TMS seminar connects the dots between farm and food justice; health and well-being; and race, class, and gender. These seminar-style classes meet four times a week and are graded and for credit. They introduce students to conceptual frameworks and terminology that will help students understand the labor practices and land uses of farming, the food economy, racial and cultural identity construction, and the physiological connections between sleep and anxiety, among many other topics.
Living in Community
Much of the learning that happens at the Mountain School is simply in the act of living with each other in a healthy and adaptive way. Below are a few of the ways that students and faculty interact and live together while at the Mountain School. Read more about how we live in community HERE.
Five dormitories, ranging in size from seven to twelve students, provide a setting for students to build lasting relationships with each other and their dorm faculty. Most days conclude with check in, a short dorm meeting with all students and a faculty member.
Residential Life
Meals at the Mountain School are participatory, with everyone lending a hand in cooking and cleaning up afterward. Chefs develop menus that feature simple, hearty dishes prepared from scratch, aimed to acquaint eaters with a place-based diet.
Food and Dining
In addition to having a faculty member advisor, students have access to a number of other supports, including: counseling services, affinity groups, and a school nurse who coordinates healthcare needs.
Student Support
The weekly schedule includes several opportunities for the whole school to gather and discuss relevant topics. Five days of the week begin with a short Morning Meeting where anyone can share announcements. On Wednesdays we have a longer School Meeting with an agenda set by students and faculty, alike. Each Friday night, students gather for a period of reflection and journaling. Following this, students have the option to participate in activities and games or take a moment for some quiet time.
School Forums
Weekends are critical times for learning, relaxation, joy, socialization, and exploration. Saturdays are a bit structured, including a morning work period to maintain the campus and a nighttime activity planned by students. Sundays are less structured and provide opportunities for spontaneous fun with support from the faculty on duty.
Weekends
Farm & Forest
The Mountain School sits on 418 acres of mostly forested land in central Vermont. Students spend a significant amount of time outdoors participating in the production of food and fuel for the school.
In the fall semester, students pick up where the summer farm crew left off and bring in the harvest to be processed, cooked, or stored for the rest of the year. In the spring semester, students participate in maple syrup production and work to plant new crops and prepare the farm for the upcoming growing season.
Farm
Every student will spend time learning to fell and process trees as well as split logs that will eventually heat the campus buildings. Students also participate in repairing and maintaining the campus trails.
Wood Crew
Interested in applying? Request admissions information here!
Feel free to email us or complete the interest form. We’d be happy to help you!