The integration of outdoor school seemed to diminish over time, from my public school experience, and even more into my public school teaching experiences. In Elementary school, I remember visiting “Camp Schmidt,” an outdoor school owned and run by Prince George’s County Public Schools in mid/southern Maryland. In fifth grade, all PG County students looked forward to an extended stay at Camp Schmidt for about a week of ecological education, team building, and most of all, running through the “Confidence Course,” a challenging obstacle course that ended in a zipline. Boys and girls stayed overnight for several nights in separate lodgings. In high school, my older brother’s freshman class visited Camp Schmidt in 1996 for an overnight stay, but after some of the boys snuck over to the girls’ bunks, our school cancelled all further trips to Camp Schmidt. Was this decision due to behavior that had never happened before? In the history of Camp Schmidt, had no campers ever tried to visit campers of the opposite gender? Was it due in part to race, as students from our high school were generally non-white?
This year, the PG County school system has closed Camp Schmidt, allegedly due to budgetary constraints, however, I wonder if this decision was politically driven. In the last 30-40 years, PG county has undergone “white flight,” moving from a generally white population to 90% non-white today. Do the privileges or expectations of/for non-white students, particularly males, differ from those expectations for whites? Why was it important for students to experience outdoor, camp-like education 30 years ago, but today it is so unimportant that it has to be cut from a school’s budget? Is the current school culture so different from past school cultures, that outdoor school is no longer for these students?
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