Unity College students mentor Mount View pupils

THORNDIKE – Seventh grade – for many, the phrase conjures up all kinds of remembered horrors, many linked to the awkwardness of the age.

On Friday, though, Mount View Junior High School Principal Ozzie Crowley was feeling pretty good about his 130 seventh-graders. The young teens spent three days and two nights this week at Camp Susan Curtis in rural Stoneham, west of Lewiston and south of Bethel, in a retreatlike setting, learning leadership and team-building skills.

“This is the first year this has happened for these kids,” Crowley said Friday.

Many schools send their students to Camp Kieve in Nobleboro for similar training, but the cost of that program was out of reach for Mount View, in SAD 3 in western Waldo County.

Enter students from nearby Unity College, a small, private environmental school. The college “adopted” Mount View Junior High School, Crowley said, and Unity senior Peter Marris worked with professor Mac McInnes to put together a program that included some of the same components offered at Kieve.

Camp Susan Curtis, founded by former Gov. Kenneth Curtis, donated the use of its facilities, and Unity College students and staff volunteered their time. University of Maine at Farmington students also helped out.

To offset other costs, the school landed a $3,349 grant from the MBNA Foundation, and another grant was made by the Unity Foundation. The principal also gave some money toward the trip.

The result, Crowley said, was that students had to pay just $10 each for the program.

Marris met with parents a week ago to review the program and it goals. All but a dozen students participated in the overnight program.

Crowley spent Thursday at the camp, and came away thrilled with what he saw.

“I can’t say enough good things about it,” he said. “It’s an amazing place.”

The program included team-building, cooperative learning and leadership activities, workshops on stopping bullying and harassment, as well as sessions on water ecology and other outdoors-based learning.

“The kids were out canoeing,” Crowley said, as well as using the camp’s ropes and obstacle courses.

“It was just amazing,” he said, to see students working together and growing in confidence and trust. At Mount View Junior High, pupils from several kindergarten-grade eight schools in the 11-town district meet for the first time in seventh grade, which adds to the stress of the experience.

“These kids need to believe in themselves,” Crowley said.

Students slept in log cabins near the pond. Crowley said he made a point to check in with one student, whose parents were worried he would be homesick.

“He didn’t want to come home,” he said.

Unity College staff will offer two follow-up days with the seventh-graders later this school year, Crowley said.

“I wanted this to be an experience they wouldn’t forget,” he said, and by what the principal observed on Thursday, it seems to have met that goal.