Like Gardens, students grow throughout summer

By Roger Piantadosi Rappahannock News Staff Writer
Source: Rappahannock News
THURSDAY, AUGUST 13 2009

At the Mountain Laurel Montessori Farm School in Flint Hill, you probably wouldn't want to automatically associate the words “summer” and “vacation.”

Summer is a break from daily classes for the 15 seventh- through ninth-graders who attend the five-year-old Farm School – and thus tend its 23 acres of pastures, woods and a pond plus the main schoolhouse, a large hoop barn and assorted outbuildings, a few pigs, a dozen chickens and some sheep.

But throughout the growing season, Mountain Laurel students return at least one day a week to pick tomatoes, peppers, beans and greens from the garden they planted in the spring, and to help farm manager Sarah Cooper transport and sell them at the Front Royal Farmers' Market, among such other chores as mowing, trimming, weeding and cleaning.

The other day, the farm's three Border Leicester sheep needed to be moved from a front pasture to a clover-laden enclosure with a new sheep house built from 2x4s, heavy-gauge fence and waterproof tarps by student Phillip Grambo, 15, who actually graduated from the farm school in June. Helping out were Phillip's not-very-identical twin brother, Rory, also bound for Fauquier High School next month, and current students Joshua Owens, 13, and Allie Mingo and Erika Hughey, both 14.

Students come by in summer, as they do throughout the school year, for “community work,” says school director Susan Holmes, meaning the school community – this being a Montessori school – but the greater community as well.

“In fact we're hoping this fall to be doing some work with the Plant-a-Row people,” she says, speaking of the county's new food bank. “I want to get the students down there to see the fruits of their efforts, to help out, and meet some of the people who are picking up produce. And it's so wonderful to see just all of what people produce and donate all in one place like that.”

The sheep go quietly, sort of, to their new pasture. Rory turns on the new solar-powered electric fence; Holmes fills the water buckets that Erika and Joshua have carried over.

The students chat quietly with each other when they aren't helping to lift and turn the sheep house, fetch corn, bring the water hose. Except for the occasional random vault over a low fence or playful leap up to swat a low-hanging oak branch, they seem more like young adults than teenagers.

Someone asks Holmes: So, are you teaching these young people to be farmers?She smiles, glancing at the students around her. “We are just teaching them to be well-rounded people,” she says. The farm, it turns out, is a way of taking what they learn inside about chemistry, physics, history and math and giving it a grounding in . . . well, yes.

The ground.

http://www.rappnews.com/news/2009/aug/13/mountain-laurel-farm-school-has-year-round-curricu/