Fair-Mont-Egan School is hoping its volunteer instructor electives program will revive connections lost with community and family members during the pandemic when many schools had visitor restrictions in place.

“With Covid, we realized we lost a lot of our community because people weren’t coming in,” Fair-Mont-Egan Family Liaison Coordinator Annie Mitton said, including the Parent Teacher Friends group. “Now, we’re trying to bring our community back in the school.”

Prior to the pandemic, Fair-Mont-Egan embraced the idea of volunteer instructors who could share skills they were passionate about. Bringing the volunteers in would allow the rural school to expand its middle school electives.

“We’re such a small school that unfortunately we don’t have the funding to pay for all the electives we want,” Mitton said, noting that electives at the middle school level are important to helping students explore a variety of subjects and interests before high school.

“We had community members with a lot of experience and expertise,” Mitton said. “They wanted to teach our kids and they volunteered to do this for us.”

While the electives taught by volunteers aren’t part of the regular curriculum like classes taught by certified teachers are and students don’t earn credit, students are graded on areas such as engagement, work ethic and respect, Mitton said.

THIS SCHOOL year, Fair-Mont-Egan volunteer instructor Daron Larsen, an ALERT helicopter pilot, is teaching Outdoor Survival Skills. Last year, he taught an outdoor activities class.

“At work, we go through this extensively,” he said about the topic.

For the middle school students, he drills down to the basics needed for a scenario they might encounter such as getting lost or stranded on a hiking or camping trip.

Larsen starts his lessons with a motivational quote. On Feb. 15, he read a quote about defining moments in life based on choices we make in times of difficulty to quit or continue.

“We can relate that to survival even,” Larsen said. “You’re out there in the woods. It’s cold. It’s dark. You just want to give up. It’s what you do in that moment is how the outcome is gonna be.”

During this lesson, students were tasked with making outdoor shelters using just tarps and ropes. Earlier in the elective, Fair-Mont-Egan student Ty Heidegger said the class learned about snow shelters, which was new to the sixth-grader who hunts.

“I learned some handy snow shelters like a quinzee is what it’s called,” Heidegger said, describing it as a dome-shaped temporary structure.

Before going outside Larsen asked students to think about constructing a shelter where they could get out of the elements for a night, reminding them of the cold weather outside and the snow covered ground. He then gives them the parameters for where to set their shelters up.

“Find something natural — trees, bushes,” Larsen said.

Outside, the class headed to a field dotted by evergreens, and divided into groups. Larsen held out a box containing the tarp and rope, helping each group cut as much rope as they thought they needed before spreading out.

Over by one tree, seventh-graders Hailee Ballensky, Maci Mitchell and sixth-grader Leilani Ersland emerged from a gap in the overhanging branches. Behind them was a suspended blue tarp near the tree trunk.

“We put the tarp in the tree and then we looped the string through the holes and around the branches,” Mitchell said.

Ballensky added, “If we’re starting a fire we’re going to dig a hole into the ground so then the fire can’t spread.”

While they weren’t starting fires in this class, they have in previous ones.

“So normally, we learn how to do it with kindling and matches or lighters,” Ballensky said. “We learned how to start a fire with cotton balls in Vaseline.”

Larsen said these lessons are built on previous ones, such as packing light.

“When we started the class the first little chapter was what’s in my pack. We made a list of about 50 items and I narrowed it down to 12,” he said, noting how important each decision is if they ever faced an emergency situation.

BACK INSIDE the school, another elective was underway. Fair-Mont-Egan volunteer Nancy Roberts, a paper-mache artist, watched on as students dipped strips of newspaper into containers of a paste made of flour, water, salt and glue. Removing the excess paste, students drape the strips over sculptures that include a snowman, football athlete, rabbit, horse, turtle and Dachshund.

The students will continue to layer and smooth the newspaper strips over the hand-built sculptures. The sculptures provide the infrastructure to build the layers until a desired shape is achieved, according to Roberts, and can be made out of a variety of materials such as styrofoam.

Roberts has been building fantastical paper-mache sculptures since high school and decided it was a great art form to introduce to middle school students, who may not be able to fit art class in their schedules.

“Kids need to express themselves,” Roberts said about art. “Paper mache is an easy way to do it.”

One of the original elective volunteer teachers is Chris Scott who has taught sewing at Fair-Mont-Egan for more than two years helping students learn to measure, cut and use a sewing machine, iron and make projects they can use like pot holders, hand warmers, blankets and pillowcases.

She initially started the class with help from her three sisters.

“She was really the heart of how all this started,” Mitton said about the volunteer instructor program.

What she enjoys most about working with the middle school students is their out-of-the-box thinking.

“You tell them, ‘OK, here’s the material. Here’s what we’re going to do. Now pick out your material. They pick things that I would never have thought of going together,” Scott said. “Then it comes out looking fantastic.”

“To me, working with the kids is really rewarding,” Scott said. “It’s a lot of fun.”

Mitton said if people have a skill they would like to teach to sixth- through eighth-graders to call the school at 406-755-7072. She requests volunteer instructors commit to teaching one to two classes a week over the course of a trimester.

Reporter Hilary Matheson may be reached at 406-758-4431 or by email at hmatheson@dailyinterlake.com.

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