Horses healing force for alternative ed students

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UNION – Every high school has them. They are the square pegs that don’t fit into round holes. They are labeled alternative students – the ones who can’t sit in conventional classrooms with conventional teaching and learn in conventional ways.

Instead, they learn by doing, by feeling, by repetitive action.

In the case of a group of students from Medomak Valley High School in Waldoboro, they also learn by shoveling.

Here’s the idea: Take two dozen alternative high school students, put them in gloves and boots and set them loose on a horse rescue farm. Let them repair stalls. Wash buckets. Groom horses older than their parents. Shovel manure.

And suddenly, say their teachers and farm owner Judi Merrifield, a beautiful thing starts to happen when the students who no one knows what to do with meet the horses that no one wants.

“This is a place to heal,” Merrifield said recently. “They – and I mean both the kids and the animals – can be themselves. There is no judgment.”

Society, she says, often thinks of rescue animals as “throwaways. In conventional education, all too often, so are these kids.”

On a misty, winter afternoon, cold fog slipping into the paddocks and nearby woods, 10 high-schoolers were busy at Mountain Equine Rescue.

They fixed a broken stall gate. They stopped and spoke to the farm’s patriarch, Oliver Twist, a nearly blind 35-year-old gelding. They tossed hay down from the loft. They murmured through a gate to a small filly and stopped to scratch a farm dog behind the ears.

Standing in their midst, Merrifield took a moment to explain the different types of Appaloosas. She stopped again to oversee a fence repair. The barn has become a classroom, the paddock a lab.

“This is the teachable moment,” science-teacher-turned-farmhand Shannon Nachajko said.

Tucked into the side of Pleasant Mountain in rural Union, Merrifield’s 20 acres is often the last stop for misfit horses – the rejected, cast-aside animals plucked from trailers bound for Canadian meat packers, hand-carried out of fields, found tied to fences and abandoned.

She cares for and feeds 50 rescued horses, two emus, a pack of Jack Russell terrier puppies and a coop of chickens.

And on Wednesdays from 8:30 in the morning to 1:30 in the afternoon, she adds 24 teenagers to her menagerie.

In the first two-and-a-half months of the agriculture alternative experience, Nachajko said she has seen major changes in the students.

“Some of these kids were absolutely lost in the woodwork,” she said. “Now they are stepping up and becoming a presence. They are communicating better with their peers. They are finding a personal strength they didn’t even know they had. There is a lot of self-confidence being built in this barn, and they are bringing that confidence and these skills back to the classroom.”

Kyle Tompkins, 15, of Waldoboro, looks like any other young farmhand. His rock band-logo T-shirt and jeans are loose on his thin frame. His boots are dirty from tossing manure easily into a wheelbarrow. This isn’t math or history or French, but Tompkins said he’s learning life lessons here.

“I have discovered that horses are like people. Some are angry. Some are sweet,” Kyle said. “If you abuse them, they become mean. If you treat them well, they are friendly. It is just like our own personalities.” By using his new powers of observing and reacting to such traits in teachers and classmates, Kyle said he can be more successful.

“My life has totally turned around. This has helped me be more social, more outgoing,” Kyle said.

Linwood “Woody” Townsend, who taught conventional high school for 33 years and has been teaching in the alternative program for four years, said he is awed by the changes in the participating students.

“They are learning the value of hard work, responsibility and how to meet their obligations,” he said. Rather than having to wait a week to be graded on a homework assignment, the horse rescue students get immediate gratification, he noted.

To illustrate his point, Townsend nodded his head towards a boy shoveling a stall. As he finished, the boy leaned back on his shovel with a smile, looking down on his good work.

“This is a way of giving back and getting something in the process,” Townsend said.

Merrifield’s rescue farm survives on adoption fees and donations, but she also works part time to buy feed and pay a veterinarian. The rescuer treasures the work that the students do.

“After all, this isn’t a museum where you can turn the heat down, shut off the lights and close the door,” she said.

Nachajko said the year-long alternative program will focus on earth science in the spring. “We are going to get into soil testing and put in a garden,” she said.

The hard part, she said, is keeping the kids away. The other four days of the school week, they are in classrooms.

“They are starting to come down to the farm by themselves on the weekends, just to volunteer,” she said.

For information about volunteering at Mountain Equine Rescue, to donate or to adopt a horse, contact Merrifield at 785-4628 or mountainpony@lycos.com.