UNCONVENTIONAL EDUCATION PROGRAMS

THE SUN RISES over the mountaintops, Palo Alto High School junior Avery Reller remembers joining a bustling community of students and teachers to get to work on the farm. At the Mountain School, Reller’s days are filled with the rhythms of nature — harvesting vegetables from the fertile soil, feeding and caring for the animals, and cutting down trees to provide firewood for the long winter months ahead.

The Mountain School — a 418 acre hilltop farm in Vershire, Vermont — is a semester-long program founded in 1963 for 45 high school juniors who, according to its website, learn to “understand the world and your place in it in a new way.”

This unconventional education experience is just one of the many options that Paly students can participate in for a semester.

The Mountain School

Although Reller took the same classes during her semester at the Mountain School and at Paly, she emphasized environmental education as the main difference.

“We had a class that was all just about agriculture and sustainable agriculture and environmental justice called farm seminar,” Reller said. “It was an open conversation about climate change, sustainability, kind of everything.”

Reller added that her classes had an environmental aspect, which connected back to the surroundings in Vermont.

“In our environmental studies class, we would go outside and learn how to identify different types of trees or walk to a stream and identify specific characteristics of the Vermont outdoor environment we had been learning about,” Reller said. “We learned about sustainable agriculture, environmental justice and a lot of climate change issues in the world and specifically present in Vermont.”

By focusing on the environment, Reller said the Mountain School shifted her perspective on education and instilled a passion for the environment.

“I think most people, by the end of it [the semester] definitely had more of a passion for wanting to be outside more and being in the environment and caring about it more and being more conscious of their choices and day-to-day environmental interactions,” Reller said.

Aside from gaining a passion for the environment, Reller discovered a preference for hands-on learning through her experience.

“Everything we did we did it outside or doing something super interactive, and it made me learn that I really liked that for myself,” Reller said.

Although learning at the Mountain School was a transformative experience, Reller said that there were some drawbacks.

“I think it’s hard being in such a contained space,” Reller said. “It doesn’t really feel like you have as much freedom because you’re kind of constrained to your dorm a lot of the time and just seeing the same people [makes] your routine so constant and it can feel really repetitive.”

To attend the Mountain School, students go through an application process that involves answering questions about their interests. Tuition for a semester is a hefty $36,975, although the Mountain School’s website states that 40 percent of their