Taking a Chance Pays Off at Camp : Continuation School Yields Counselors

The prospect of using so-called “problem students” from Alta Vista Continuation High School to counsel, guide and live with fifth-grade campers left the principal of the Vista Unified School District’s outdoor education program cold.

“I had to be convinced,” said Bill Stribley, when Alta Vista Principal Sandra Williamson suggested that this year he use some of her students as counselors.

The outdoor education program is aimed at giving the district’s fifth-graders first-hand knowledge of the area’s indigenous plants and animals and also an understanding of certain Indian lore.

As part of their science curriculum, students attend the weeklong camp sessions held at the 142-acre Green Oak Ranch, located inside the Vista city limits. The school district rents the outdoor area from the Union Rescue Mission of Los Angeles, which owns and operates the ranch.

Six-Week Training

Naturalists, who have trained for six weeks in preparation for the camp, guide the students on nature hikes, where they learn the difference between a riparian ecosystem (near rivers and streams) and that in the higher, chaparral country. The students make their own fossil replicas out of clay, and participate in an archeological dig. They handle indigenous snakes such as the rosy boa, the California striped racer and the Sonoran gopher snake. And they learn to identify native plants such as poison oak, sycamore, black sage and laurel sumac.

With bullfrogs burping nearby, the fifth-graders begin to learn about sediment by plunging their hands into a stream and examining handfuls of the soggy bottom soil.

The students also attend classes and labs on outdoor survival practices, Indian crafts, archery and horseback riding.

Sixteen-year-old Tom Muldowny was one of the Alta Vista counselors. “I don’t remember it being this fun when I came here in the sixth grade,” Muldowny said, as his campers scraped and sifted dirt from an archeological dig.

“Oh, gross,” said one girl, who found what resembled an odd-looking chicken wishbone.

“Why is it gross?” Muldowny asked. “It might be something an Indian ate.”

Nature Hike

As one naturalist explained to the children about the bone and other artifacts, another naturalist, a quarter mile away, had stopped under a sycamore tree with a group of 20 students on a riparian nature hike.

One of the counselors taking the hike was Jeni Byrum. A senior at Alta Vista, Byrum praised the leaf presses that some of the fifth-graders held up for her to see.

“For me, it’s been great,” Byrum said. “I love being here with these girls and the boys. I thought I’d be nervous, but we were so busy, there was no time to get nervous. They (the girls) just clung to me, saying, ‘I want her. I want her.’ ”

Byrum, a psychology student, still has her own treasured rock collection and leaves from her week at Green Oak seven years ago. Like all of the counselors, Byrum enjoys working with children. As a would-be psychologist, she’s taken advantage of the chance to “watch their behavior . . . and it’s just been fun working together.”

Byrum was enrolled at Alta Vista because “there were so many things I had to do, that I put off studying.” Her family had tried a number of programs, she said, but Alta Vista, which is limited to an enrollment of 175 students, got her back on track.

Stiff Competition

Historically, counselors for the program, which attracts about 200 fifth-graders a week over a four- or five-week period each spring, came mainly from Palomar College and Vista High School--and never from Alta Vista.

The competition is stiff for counselor positions. Of some 200 applicants, only about 60 are chosen. Student counselors receive credit for the work but have to keep up with their classes during the camp.

“Maturity is one of the things we look for” in potential counselors, Stribley said. “In working with the kids . . . we expect (the counselors) to behave as an adult in any situation.”

Stribley decided to take a chance this spring and try six or eight students from Alta Vista as counselors after talking the matter over with district officials. He also is trying out middle-school students as junior counselors.

‘Damn Good Idea’

“After the first (session), I decided it was a damn good idea,” Stribley said. In the first two weeks of camp, counselors from Alta Vista led their cabin teams to several first-place awards, which recognize participation in areas including enthusiasm, behavior and cleanliness.

Most of the counselors from Alta Vista were chosen from the school’s peer counseling class, said Principal Williamson. The students came to her and said they wanted to be counselors. “They thought it would be a wonderful way of topping off their year of training and working in this program,” Williamson said. “It was something they wanted to do, and something they had not been allowed to do in the past.

“Almost all of our students have come to us (because) somewhere in the course they’ve gotten behind in their credits and needed to graduate.”

Williamson attributed reasons for the poor grades to family trauma such as a death, divorce, separation; chemical dependency of someone in the family, and adjustment problems faced by a number of Alta Vista students, who “could not deal with” the huge (3,500-member) student body at Vista High School.

Stribley, the district’s man in charge of outdoor education, can’t say enough about the “problem” Alta Vista counselors. “She’s (Williamson) made me a believer,” Stribley said. “They’re really excellent.” They have been so good, Stribley said, that next year he will ask for more.