Outdoor Academy
The Outdoor Academy of the Southern Appalachians is an academic semester school for high school sophomores, and select juniors, located outside of Brevard, North Carolina.
The school is part of the Eagle's Nest Foundation, along with Eagle's Nest Camp and the Hante School.
Founded in 1991 on 180 acres of land in the western North Carolina mountains, The Outdoor Academy (or OA) provides a semester of college-preparatory study for high school sophomores and juniors. The school size is, on average, around 32 students, 100% of whom live on campus. The school stresses the connection between the teacher and student. Accordingly, the average class size is 8, while the student to teacher ratio is 1:3. The yearly tuition is $32,800, with AbOUT 25% of students on financial aid.
The Outdoor Academy is SACS-accredited.
Activities
The Outdoor Academy focuses on "experiential education," integrating school studies with outdoor activities. Students take classes as they would at their home schools, while occasionally leaving campus to participate in hiking, whitewater paddling, backpacking, caving, and rock climbing. Students are fully engaged in the learning experience, while gaining a new sense of respect for the environment, for others, and themselves.
The classes at the Outdoor Academy all try to integrate the surrounding area into their curriculum. English classes study works that relate to the Southern Appalachian area. Music classes learn to sing and play music native to the area. The NATURAL Science course, a feature of the Outdoor Academy, often involves students studying nature hands on in the ecosystems of the Appalachians. Other classes include multiple levels of mathematics, a variety of foreign languages, visual arts, world history, and Appalchian History.
Students at the Outdoor Academy participate in an independent Appalachian studies project. This is a semester long project studying a "cultural, historic, economic, political, ecological, geographical or artistic aspect of the Southern Appalachians." Students, while being helped by some of the faculty, do most of the work and the learning involved in these projects on their own. Subjects of the projects have ranged from blacksmithing and buckskinning, to toy making and woodworking.
In their outdoor adventures, students often paddle the Green and Nantahala rivers, cave in Worley's Cave, climb at Looking Glass Rock, and hike in Pisgah National Forest, Joyce Kilmer National Forest, and elsewhere.