At the end a week at OSPREY Camp, students in Kathy Vance’s sixth-grade class had an opportunity to stand up, add a stick to the campfire, and share what they’d learned that they wanted to bring back to their personal lives.
The group was surprised when the first person to speak was a student we’ll call Helen, one of the shyest girls Vance had ever taught. Helen rarely made eye contact, had few friends, and found group situations painful. Yet here she was. “She started to cry and shake,” says Vance. “She told us, ‘I’ve always been so shy, and I’m trying to learn to be braver. That’s what I want to take back.’” At that point, every single classmate got up and hugged her. That was two years ago.
Helen is now in 8th grade, and almost unrecognizable. “She joins things, she volunteers in class, and she’s always talking to someone,” says Vance. “It happened at camp.”
Such stories are common at OSPREY Camp, which combines Environmental Education with leadership skills, team building, and mentorship from older students. Teachers have witnessed powerful transformations in their students after just one visit, changes that last beyond the program’s afterglow to have significant impact even years later.
The program is based at Camp Solomon Schechter on a 180-acre green belt in the heart of Tumwater. Primarily known as a summer camp for Jewish children and young adults, Schechter brought in the OSPREY curriculum four years ago through environmental educator and Camp Director Sue Wattier. The site is also home to the state’s only thriving kettle bog which serves as both a natural wonder and educational tool. The Department of Ecology is working with Schechter to monitor the health of the bog.
According to feedback from teachers, campers consistently gain benefits that last a lifetime, ranging from cognitive effects to behavioral changes and a new focus for their futures. The confidence gained at camp extends to academic subjects, in part due to how they’re taught. “When we do lessons in the watershed and talk about human impact, it’s a living laboratory,” says Wattier. “They get to touch and feel and smell and experience the outdoors. We’ve done testing before and after, and their test results go up exponentially. They have a lot more confidence about what they’re being asked.”
The hands-on approach helps students understand content and remember better. “It’s real world learning,” says Kristy Johnson. “Kids that don’t do so well in the sitting and reading environment tend to do really well at camp. It increases their self-confidence because now they’re successful.” That change continues once they return to their regular classroom. “We see a better focus when they’re back,” she says. Johnson teaches 5th grade at Cascade View Elementary School in the Tukwila District, named the most diverse in the country several years ago. Among the student body, 92% receive free and reduced lunches, between 25% and 30% are refugees, and 60% are English Language Learners (ELL).
Older students serve as mentors for the younger ones during academic lessons, with teachers providing oversight. Having role models near their own age makes a difference not only for younger students, but for their mentors as well.
“The high school students have a big impact on our kids because they’re from our area,” says Johnson. “They get to see kids like themselves in positions of leadership, being in charge of something. Sometimes they’re siblings of students we have. Our kids really look up to them.”
A common reaction is for campers to want to become mentors themselves, a process that takes patience since they won’t be eligible for several years. “Many come back to be mentors because they had such a fabulous experience when they were in 5th or 6th grade,” says Wattier. “The highest accolades are having kids so excited to be mentors that they contact us the moment they get to high school in the fall of their freshman year. We tell them they have to wait until after the first of the year when we’re ready to recruit them.”
With so many students coming from fiscally distressed districts, the biggest impact is often on the neediest kids, says Johnson. “They know they’re going to eat three times a day and have their own bed to sleep in. They’ve just been surviving, and this gives them a safe place where they can be away from everything that influences them and that they can’t control. It’s a turning point for students, a place to think beyond their immediate surroundings. They start to see another way and realize that their lives can be different.”
For some, that translates into a new connection with nature. “The students often go back and get their families to go hiking and camping on weekends,” says Vance. “They do things they wouldn’t have done before. We had one boy who told me at camp that he was going to become a ranger in Alaska. He ended up graduating from Brown University, and he could have done anything, but he did it – he became a ranger. A big piece of that was the experience at camp.”
Currently, Camp Solomon Schechter is in the midst of a capital campaign, raising funds to replace outdated infrastructure and renovate the kitchen and dining hall, which were built in 1940. The goal is to expand capacity to serve more campers both through its faith-based programming and through OSPREY Camp.
“That matters,” says Vance, “and not just for this generation. Bringing students into nature and teaching them about the environment is an investment in the future. It helps our community to have these young people who will grow up and have a voice in trying to keep Washington beautiful.”
To learn more about OSPREY Camp, visit www.campschechter.org/ospreycamp or call 360-338-0800.
