School-Business Partnership Teaches Pocahontas County Students Outdoor Skills

Like so many success stories, Nature’s Mountain Classroom began with a problem. Tracey Valach was a homeschool mom in Pocahontas County. Her husband worked at Snowshoe Mountain Ski Resort.

“For a long time, you know, he would say, ‘We need more local employees. We need more, more kids taking advantage of the resources that we have here,’” Valach said. 

On Sundays the resort offered free skiing passes for the local community. But the redemption rates were really low. 

“We weren’t seeing local children wanting to work in that industry. And they weren’t skiing, they weren’t partaking in what’s in their backyard,” Valach said.

Turns out, no one had taught them to ski. Or kayak. Or take part in any of the world class outdoor adventures that attract tourists from across the country and sometimes around the world. So Valach put together a program to teach all of those skills and more to Pocahontas County students. 

Courtesy Of Tracey Valach/Nature’s Mountain Classroom

And when the nonprofit Education Alliance announced the winners of its first ever statewide School-Business Partnership competition earlier this month, the grassroots program started by a mom in Pocahontas County was the top winner.  

First Valach spoke with folks at places like the home extension office where she worked and the parks and recreation department, for ideas on how to fit a school curriculum into the mix. When she approached the school system, now Superintendent Lynne Bostic was then in charge of the county-wide curriculum.

“You start thinking, ‘That’s great, but have we thought about things like transportation? Who has the insurance coverage? Is it tied to our curriculum?’ Every question that I asked, she had already considered and proposed, you know, the answer, it was just amazing,” Bostic said.

Education Alliance Executive Director Amelia Courts said she knows the partnership is helping students to learn. She also hopes it will give some of the skills they need for local jobs in the future.

“On the one hand, you have students that are graduating and not prepared for careers, right? And then at the same time, in the same community, you have employers with job vacancies that need those ski instructors or the resort managers, those kinds of hospitality opportunities,” Courts said. 

“So what the partnership did is they mapped out, along with the curriculum, how those learning opportunities could tie into science, how they could tie into math, and then they planned a skill set for every grade level.”

So when a local fly fishing operation taught the kids how to catch trout, those same kids also learned about obtuse, right and acute angles. On nature hikes they learn about the life cycle of plants. And at Snowshoe Mountain, they learned how to ski and so much more. 

“They did a first aid course with the Snowshoe patrol and one of our high schoolers that’s an EMT, and they built first aid kits,” said Valach. “They learned about foods that fuel by making a trail mix that had the different food groups in it with Parks and Rec. And then they were actually completing their forest ranger book, and they were sworn in as junior forest rangers.” 

The Nature’s Mountain Classroom program – called Adventure Pocahontas – is free to every public school student in the county. Community partners provide everything from lift tickets and kayaks to snow pants, mittens and helmets. Valach said part of what makes the program work so well is the community partnerships she found with places like Jack Horner’s Corner, which rents sports equipment. 

“I don’t want them to write me a check. I want them to deliver me kayaks, right? And so those types of things are just perfect partnerships, because it’s at a low cost to the business, but a huge impact to our program,” she said.

The Pocahontas  program stood out, Courts said, because of the number of students and the comprehensive nature of the program that touched every student along the way in their education career. She also said such partnerships are more important now because of the changes schools have seen in students in recent years.

“Many children are living with grandparents. Many children in West Virginia come to school hungry and need, not just physical support, but they also need emotional support and counseling. And so this whole idea of educating the whole child, it does take a village,” Courts said.

At the Education Alliance annual summit, held at the Clay Center earlier this month, keynote speaker, actress and child advocate Jennifer Garner said West Virginia students face a lot of hurdles. 

“We have so many kids, one in four kids in rural America, growing up in poverty. That number is higher in West Virginia, and those children at the age of four are 18 months behind developmentally,” Garner said.

School-community partnerships are a vital part of helping West Virginia’s kids succeed, both in school and in life, she said, and added that those relationships can start simply by following your passion. 

“We are truly stronger together. A braid is stronger than any three individual strands of hair. Find anyone who is aligned with you, and start conversations about how you can work together to deepen your commitment to what it is that you care about,” Garner said.

At the Alliance, Courts pointed to other partnerships she said are top notch, includinga project with Appalachian Power in Wayne County just a few weeks ago.

“They worked with the students on safety, and all of the students did presentations. And again, you just see that really deep learning,” Courts said. 

Toyota Motor Manufacturing and Hope Gas, she said, have internship programs targeted at high school students – critically important for students who might not have the vision or opportunity for college. 

“So what Toyota has done and Hope Gas has done is they actually recruit, and we help them recruit, high school students for a paid internship, on site, in their industry, and then those students have such amazing opportunities. They get to try out a career while they’re still in high school and see if they’re really fit and interested in for that career.” 

But she also said effective partnerships don’t have to be expensive or complicated. In the beginning, Tracey Valach said , before Nature’s Mountain Classroom was ever a thing, she just had an idea. After a little brainstorming, she took it to the board of education.

“I pitched the idea, and I held my breath to be honest, because I wasn’t sure that they would be receptive to such a wild idea,” Valach said.

Now, every single student in Pocahontas County Public Schools benefits from her wild idea.