Hands-On, Hearts In: A Reflection from Executive Director Todd Ormiston

During a campus tour I led this fall for a guest who spends a lot of time at schools like ours, we watched Industrial Arts Teacher Larry Robjent and students in his Design and Build class engage in a decidedly non-traditional learning experience

Inside the Walter Breeman Performing Arts Center’s Don Rand Theater, two groups worked together to bring a pair of twelve-foot columns up the risers to the back of the seating area. The columns were part of a stage set from a recent production; they were, literally, a heavy lift.

If you know Larry, you can imagine that this was an active experience, full of communication, problem-solving, collaboration, and redirects. After the first team got its column in place, Larry asked the other group if they wanted the newly freed hands to help complete their task. The response was a firm “No!”

Once both columns were securely placed, Larry pulled all the students together to talk about what just happened. He guided them as they reflected on their plan, what surprised them during the exercise, and what they could have done differently. When I caught up with Larry later, he said the pre-exercise work was just as extensive, during which they talked about safety, strategy, and working together as a team.

My guest that day leads an accrediting agency for independent schools such as ours. While he sees the best that schools like ours have to offer every day, he couldn’t help but remark upon the power of that moment. “It's been a long time since I've seen so much joy in a school,” he said.

It was a demonstration of all of the best parts of the experiential learning that happens on our campus every day, and the many components that underlie them all.

Preparation and learning. An active, hands-on experience. Reflection and future planning.

So many experiences on our campus look just like this. Whether Chicken Harvest, outdoor trips, performances, or swim tests, each exposes our students to deliberate learning moments they can apply long after they head into the world.

We know this way of learning so well. So when it came time to develop our strategic plan, it made sense to apply this familiar approach. To learn more about ourselves, we reflected on our past and present while planning for the future. By the end, we identified the aspects of Camp and School that have held steady since our founding: our program, people, and purpose, all of which work together to instill positive change in our community and in the world.

Growing Evergreen, our strategic plan is the culmination of this work. It calls for bold and thoughtful enhancements to the ways we work with children; the things we do to attract, support, and retain those who educate them; and our efforts to impact and learn from the world beyond our 237-acre home.

In the Winter 2025 issue of Organic Roots, we take a deep dive into Growing Evergreen’s ongoing work and progress in a special feature beginning on page 21. You’ll learn more about the important advancements we’ve made in our safety protocols and approach to our outdoor programs (“Staying on Trail”), the ways we’re improving the quality of our teachers’ and counselors’ living spaces (“Mountain Zen”), and how we’re sharing the power of our experiential learning model with the world (“Inspiring Others”).

We’re also considering how our physical spaces can support our programming. This fall, we started building a new road, rerouting Bramwell Run to unify Junior Camp and decrease traffic in the center of our campus.

Each of these adjustments, though, stays true to the intentions of our founders and our time-tested approach to working with children. And like the effective experiential educators we strive to be, we constantly debrief on our planning and actions to confirm we’re fulfilling our needs, not our wants.

When I caught up with Larry after observing his class, I asked if this was a team-building exercise that he did in this class every year. “No,” he said. “I just needed to get those columns up there.”

Not surprisingly, embedded within this seemingly simple activity was an educational experience that is deeply centered around meaningful work. Just like Larry’s class, Growing Evergreen will continue to undertake meaningful work with immediate impacts on our community—work that will build on our already strong foundation for today while also preparing us for the next 100 years of Camp and School.

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