06/15/2023
We are so proud of the students who spent this past year at the Yew School! We witnessed incredible growth and change in all of the students and learned so much from and with them. We hope they'll remember that there's always a winding path that will lead them to a place, either at here at the YMC, or new places they find on their own throughout their lives, where they will be welcomed as the people they are and supported to grow into the people they want to be. We are honored you chose us to be that place for you this year.
The Yew Mountain Center board voted this spring to pause the operations of The Yew School at the conclusion of the 2022-2023 academic year.
This pilot program broke new ground in creating an integrated, experiential, and placed-based curriculum for middle school students in Pocahontas County. Low enrollment and limited funding were the primary factors in making the decision to not offer the school next year. The remote location of the school proved prohibitive for many families considering The Yew School as an educational alternative for their children.
We considered alternative locations in Greenbrier County, where there is a bigger population of middle school-aged children and a larger market of families interested in an outdoors-focused education. However, the YMC board decided that administering an off-site school was beyond the current capacity of the small organization of the Yew Mountain Center both in terms of staffing and financial resources.
An additional circumstance contributed to this decision. Yew Mountain Center learned this year of the opportunity to purchase the property on which the organization has operated and has been leasing since 2016. This is an exciting prospect for our nonprofit and one that will require the focusing of its resources over the next year or more. It is our hope that once we are successful with the purchase, we can rededicate attention to The Yew School and build upon the lessons learned during our pilot year of this middle school.
The Yew Mountain Center is committed to increasing access to quality experiential education for area youth and will continue and expand offerings of field trips and signature expedition-style explorations of academics for groups of students. The organization is open to partnerships with area schools and homeschool groups to bring The Yew School style education to their schools and/or to bring students to our facilities. Please stay tuned for our “What’s Next” as we consider collaborations and programs that could emerge from the foundation created this year.
We are grateful for the support and interest shown by the Walton Family Foundation, the VELA foundation, private donors, volunteers, and the community at large as we worked to create an accessible educational alternative for middle school children. While we had hoped this initial effort had proven to be more sustainable, The Yew School is proud to have provided a year of high-quality education at little to no cost for an amazing group of students and families brave enough to be a part of this experiment.
The Yew Mountain Center is deeply appreciative of the efforts of our amazing team of teachers, Zach, Patrick, Margaret, and Shane who also took this leap with us and dedicated their considerable talents and energy to creating this school. We will continue to support and cheer on efforts in the region to engage more students in experiential learning in the boundless and beautiful classroom of Appalachia.
