Although children in Aroostook County are on summer vacation and the two major biathlon events scheduled to be held next winter in Fort Kent are more than five months away, biathletes Walt Shepard and Haley Johnson are still thinking about snow and school.

Johnson has been spending the recent months revising a teacher’s guide to the World Junior Biathlon Championships, which will be held at the Nordic Heritage Center in Presque Isle next January. Johnson and Shepard together run a nonprofit organization called Healthy Aim, which offers school visits to talk about healthy lifestyles.

Johnson and Shepard are members of the Maine Winter Sports Center team, which is based in Aroostook County, and have competed at the national and international levels for U.S. national teams.

Johnson, who grew up in Lake Placid, N.Y. but now calls Fort Kent home, created a teacher’s guide for the 2005 International Paralympics Committee’s Nordic World Championships, which were held in Fort Kent last winter.

Now she’s rewriting the guide for the Junior World Championships, which will take place in Presque Isle early next year.

The guide will include information on Nordic skiing and biathlon, an Olympic sport which combines shooting and skiing.

“[The guide] brings skiing into the classroom to promote things like active living and healthy lifestyles as well as ways to enjoy living in northern Maine,” Johnson said.

The youth and junior championship meet isn’t the only major competition happening at the Maine Winter Sports Center next winter. The U.S. Olympic trials for the 2006 Games in Turin, Italy, will be held next December in Fort Kent.

Those upcoming events, plus the popularity of the World Cup event in Fort Kent in 2004, could make for a lot of interest in biathlon in the upcoming school year.

According to the Healthy Aim Web site, www.healthyaim.com, the program’s main goal is to motivate kids to lead active and healthy lifestyles through personal accountability, including setting goals and making good decisions.

Healthy Aim includes a series of visits to schools. Shepard said U.S. national team members have visited schools from Benedicta to Fort Kent, plus St. Francis and Van Buren – more than 1,000 kids, he estimated.

“We talk to kids about being healthy and the importance of health and physical activity on a regular basis,” said Shepard, a Yarmouth native now also living in Fort Kent who competed in the world championships last winter. “We’re trying to target the group of Maine kids that’s increasingly becoming more sedentary.”

The programs run by Johnson and Shepard are similar to the program run by twin sisters Lanny and Tracy Barnes last summer in which local children learn to use an air rifle similar to those the biathletes use in competition.

Shepard said starting community programs is a way to give back to Aroostook County.

“We all recognize the deeper mission of the MWSC,” he said. “One of the things we each can do is to come up with the idea, plan it and do it.”

For Johnson, the interaction with the community is one of the more interesting elements of the Maine Winter Sports Center team.

“It gives us an opportunity to meet people in town, meet families, meet young kids and older people,” she said. “It’s a great way to get integrated into the smaller pockets [of people] rather than just being here to be here. Otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to create such great relationships with the community.”