I am writing to follow up on our recent announcement that we will pause the Mountain Campus program for the 2024–2025 school year. This is an important time and an important opportunity to rethink how the Mountain Campus program and place-based education can better fit within the fabric of the full BBA experience.
Process and timeline
We have formed a small steering committee to coordinate thinking throughout this spring and summer, with recommendations to go to the board of trustees in September 2024. The committee is comprised of Associate Head Meg Kenny, Academic Dean Jen Hyatt, Advancement Director Kate Leach, and me. This group will guide a process that taps into the best thinking of various constituencies in our community, including students, parents, Mountain Campus alumni and their families, current and former Mountain Campus personnel, and others who have shown great interest in the Mountain Campus program and the value of place-based education.
For the next few months, we will be gathering the best thinking and ideas for how to utilize the Mountain Campus as a resource. How can we reach a broader segment of the BBA student body? What options exist to create direct linkages between the main campus experience and the Mountain Campus? How can we reduce some of the barriers that kept more students from signing up for the semester program?
The Mountain Campus next year
During the 2024-25 school year, the Mountain Campus facility will be used as a base of community-building, beginning with orientation and leadership programming, and extending to advisory, athletic team retreats, class visits, and departmental, and extracurricular retreats. Existing summer experiences for local elementary and middle schools and our own Student Success Program will continue as usual, with other opportunities to be considered as the steering committee's work progresses between now and September. In addition, we are considering various requests from outside organizations to utilize the facility.
As we all know, the building is wonderful: LEED platinum certified, stunning views, surrounded by natural beauty. It will continue to be a resource for BBA and the surrounding community.
Programmatic options
Virtually every student who attended the Mountain Campus from inception right up through the present has vouched for the extraordinary nature of the experience. Again and again, we have heard that the Mountain Campus was the best thing many of them had ever done.
First of all, we will strive to figure out a way to continue the immersive program that was fundamental to creating such life-changing power while making it attractive and desirable for a greater number of students. In this case, more is better (up to a certain point, of course).
Second, we need to bring this experience in some way, shape, or form to more students than we are currently reaching. Figuring out how to broaden the experience and how to incorporate place-based, experiential thinking into more of what we do will benefit more kids in more ways.
In the coming months, we need to consider both paths: how do we create immersive experiences that are deep enough to be life-changing? How do we incorporate these kinds of experiences more broadly into the BBA community? These are separate yet complementary questions.
The enrollment issue
Over the last several years, enrollment at the Mountain Campus has posed two problems: first, with low enrollment, the per-student program cost becomes unreasonable. Second, those low numbers impact the experience on the Mountain AND represent a lost opportunity for the many students who choose not to participate. The steering committee will take a close look at the factors impacting enrollment as well as new ideas to broaden the impact of this important place-based, experiential program.
Your impact
As Mountain Campus Alumni, you have incredible experience and perspective to share with us in this review, and I hope you will do so at one of two MC Alumni Town Halls (one in-person and one on Zoom) that we hope to schedule in March/April. Please keep an eye on your email and rsvp to participate.
Onward and forward
To everyone who felt a tug in your heart at the recent announcement: I love that you all care so deeply about BBA and the Mountain Campus. It is hard to take an offering off the table for next year, but it would be even harder to think that we could do so and nobody would care. Lots of people care, and we have every intention to capture the spirit of this caring in the form of ideas and possibilities for the future.
