Bronx students make mountains out of skyscrapers

When people hear "Outward Bound," images come to mind of kayaking in the Sea of Cortez or climbing in Joshua Tree National Park. They don't think of navigating the subway system of one of the world's largest cities or of improved reading skills.

Richard Stopol, executive director of the New York City Outward Bound Center, is used to people asking him exactly what Outward Bound is doing in an urban environment. Some call it an oxymoron. But he says the program's mission fits well with the needs and aspirations of inner-city kids.

"The drumbeat in American education is, 'We're going to raise the achievement level,' " Mr. Stopol says from the organization's offices in Long Island City, just over the East River, "whether it's getting to the top of the mountain, or moving to the next reading level."

What began as an experiment in 1987 to bring Outward Bound's activities to New York youths has evolved into several programs shaped around the organization's hands-on learning philosophy.

To date, program leaders have worked with more than 25,000 public school students and teachers from nearly 200 schools in New York City, offering teacher-training courses, summer literacy classes, and adventure programs such as sailing in Jamaica Bay and backpacking in the Catskills.

But the program's agenda also includes urban adventures that allow participants to immerse themselves in neighborhoods such as Chinatown and the Lower East Side.

As Outward Bound looked at these programs, however, staff members concluded that they needed to do more. They noticed that, while students from various schools went on potentially life-altering wilderness trips, the students then returned to the same school environment they had left.

Outward Bound officials realized if they wanted to make a bigger impact on New York schools, they would need to go beyond one-day trips - that they should bring all of their services to one school.

Last September, Outward Bound, using public and private money, opened a school in the Soundview neighborhood of the south Bronx. The Bronx Guild is part of the city's small-school initiative that began several years ago to replace each large, low-performing school with several smaller schools of 300 to 400 students each.

The idea is to have each school partner with a community organization in order to broaden the education to include students and their families, rather than just academics.

Bronx Guild, which has 77 ninth-graders and will add a new freshman class every autumn, is a school-within-a-school, located on the fourth floor of Adlai E. Stevenson High School - which has more than 3,000 students and where only 3 in 10 graduate, says deputy superintendent Eric Nadelstern, who works with the small schools in all of the Bronx.

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