Alternative Boarding High School!!

Hi Permies Community,

I've been on Permies for a while now...not posting much but enjoying the threads, and have appreciated the community that is Permies. I'm writing to do a bit of advertising for a boarding high school I recently took a job at, Scattergood High School. I recently took the position of assistant farm manager and biology teacher and have fallen in love with the community and space that is Scattergood. Therefore, I wanted to share my love for it and let more people know about it. Scattergood is located just outside of Iowa City, outside of West Branch Iowa. Our farm manager is a well respected member of the Iowa sustainable agriculture community, as a board member of Practical Farmers of Iowa. The farm has 8 acres of organic horticulture crops and a large amount of pasture for a small beef and sheep herd, pigs for processing the school kitchen's waste, chickens, turkeys, earthworms, and a friendly donkey. All of the food we produce goes to the school's kitchen. We also have a 26 acre prairies, a beautiful campus with lots of trees, and a couple of small orchards. The school has an emphasis on sustainability and being super accepting. We try to integrate the farm as much as we can into the curriculum and while it may be a bit expensive, we do offer need-based scholarships.

Please feel free to call contact our admissions team or respond to this thread if you would have any questions!

I've also attached a link below to the

I've attached a link below the school's website. If you know anyone who public school is not working, who feels like they need an accepting community, and want to be connected the food that they eat, I think this school would be a great fit for them!

https://scattergood.org/

Ben, thanks for sharing this school it sounds like a great place to learn about growing things.

Just curious, I would like to know a little bit about what kind of kids does this school attract?

Are how to plant vegetables part of the curriculum or do they just learn from hands-on experience?

Are any of the kids from the local area?

Great questions!

The school attracts a wide variety of students. A lot of kids came during COVID because we are so cautious in that we were masks at all classes, test the students weekly, and have a very socially conscious student body and staff. We have a fair number of international students and are trying to get that back to pre-Trump levels (his policies made it harder for our international students to come unfortunately). The largest number of our students are students for whom public schools were not the right fit. A lot of our students are members of the LGBTQ+ community and public schools can obviously be really hard kids that identify as part of LGBTQ+ community. Scattergood is a really accepting community and have a strong representation of staff who identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community as well.

There aren't really classes devoted solely to learning about how to grow crops or raise of livestock but for the whole month of September we have something that we call farm term in which we spend the whole morning out at the farm diving into one topic that involves the farm. This year I co-taught a course on seed saving with the farm manager and we taught about how to grow vegetables for seed production. I also have not been here for the start of the growing season so there may be opportunities to learn about vegetable growing in May. I know that the head of school and farm manager want to develop a farm internship program over the summer. I also try to involve the farm and prairie as much as I can into my curriculum such as studying the ecology of rotational grazing or teaching about fungi through shiitake log inoculation.

There are lots of kids from local areas! The middle school is entirely made up of local students since it is not a boarding middle school and about 30 percent of the high schoolers are from local areas.

If you have any questions or would like to speak to our admissions director, I would be more than happy to link you with them!

-Ben

Thank you Ben for the detailed answers to my questions.

I don't have any children.

I was curious as I went to a boarding school one year and I feel a lot of who I am, came from meeting and making friends with a lot of people with different backgrounds and beliefs.

I was there because my parents were moving and thought I would need a more stable background.  I never asked my friends why they were there except my roommate who was there for the same reason.

Hi Ben!

I don't really have any questions, our children are both under six and not going to middle or highschool for several years to come. I just wanted to say thank you so much for sharing, I checked out their website and it looks like a dream come true! I wish I could involved there, I want to be a part of it! But we are moving to Ohio, not Iowa!

Anyway, thanks again for bringing this awesome initiative onto my radar. If only all schools operated like this!

Have a good one
-AnnaLea

Olney in Ohio is very similar to Scattergood!