Okla.’s Keystone School wins national award
By Jim Roth | Phillips Murrah P.C. |
The Journal Record
[ JUNE 1, 2009 - OKLAHOMA CITY, OK ] - It is often said that tomorrow’s hope lies in the hands of today’s children and how well they learn.
And, if that is so, thank God for the Keystone Adventure School and Farm, whose work is truly extraordinary. In fact, Keystone won the prestigious Presidential Environmental Youth Award and school representatives recently returned from Washington, D.C., where they collected the honors.
Imagine a school experience that incorporates the dynamic outside world into your in-class environment, every day. “Classrooms without walls” has helped Keystone capture and inspire their children’s imagination.
You and I surely remember begging our schoolteachers to let us go outside, study under a tree or find a way to break up the monotony of cinder block classrooms, to no avail. It was especially hard to stay focused on the chalkboard with the explosion of spring just outside the windows. Well, Keystone has found a way to create individualized “teaching moments” in a way of learning that recognizes that nature and nurture make the best combination.
Beyond the traditional classroom lie the ingredients for Keystone’s success, where they consider the outdoors to be one of their greatest teachers. The school is situated in west Edmond on 16 beautiful acres that include animal pastures, large play spaces, a pond with paddle boats, a winding creek and many trees. Their schoolhouse is a converted 13,000-square-foot home with classrooms, project areas, kitchen, workshops, art room, computer lab and cafeteria. It is a truly unconventional setting that seems ideal for these pre-kindergarten to sixth-grade learners.
By caring for horses, goats, chickens, homing pigeons and other animals, the children learn self-confidence, self-reliance, and to go beyond themselves. The school grounds’ creek, pond, and woods provide endless lessons in life science, respect for all that lives, patience and peace. Keystone’s basic belief in the restorative power of outdoor play is reinforced daily and these kids seem to excel in an indoor and outdoor environment where they have individual responsibilities.
What they do every day makes them winners.
Keystone was selected as a winner of the Presidential Award for their commitment to incorporating ecology and environmental responsibility with each day’s lessons.
Here’s just a few ways they do what they do:
• The children use the horse manure they scoop every morning to create compost with the help of their own worm farm. The compost is then used in their organic garden.
• The children and their families consume the produce from the garden and the excess is then provided to families in need through connections in the Edmond community.
• The children clean the schoolhouse and campus daily at the end of each day, using washable rags and eco-safe cleaning products such as vinegar and other non-offensive products.
• They are also monitoring the water quality in their school yard creek for research purposes and applied learning.
These children are learning valuable life lessons about themselves and the world around them. And it’s not just from books, or pictures or computer programs alone. Instead it’s from knowing what it means to cultivate vegetable seeds in an irrigated garden and realizing the bounty that comes from sweat equity.
This school is special. It takes kids who learn at different levels and allows individualized lesson plans to help them learn and grow in so many directions: educationally, spiritually, ecologically. Keystone even offers some scholarship help for a few children so that their families may cover mounting, continuous, and exorbitant medical bills for those kids. This fledgling school is off to a great start for the sake of these kids and the amazing world around all of us.
If you would like to learn more about these award winners, please check out their Web site: www.keystoneadventureschool.com.
Congrats, Keystone Kids and the adults helping to make this happen!
Jim Roth, a former Oklahoma corporation commissioner, is an attorney with Phillips Murrah P.C. in Oklahoma City, where his practice focuses on clean, green energy for Oklahoma.