Emily Stuart
Rising 9th grader

Emily Stuart, a rising 9th grader, was one of two $1,000 academic scholarships awarded to 2008 Extreme participants. Emily’s initial reaction to the news was, “Wow! This means a better summer. I really wanted a challenge and I wanted to learn history by getting out and touching it.” With the Extreme Journey High School camp, that is exactly what she will do from June 22 to July 3rd as students leave their desks behind and travel to Where America Happened. Participants will venture along the 175 mile corridor from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to Charlottesville, Virginia while storming Harpers Ferry as one of John Brown’s raiders, lunching with re-enactor James Monroe, biking the Gettysburg Battlefield and examining peace keeping plans at Dodona Manor. 

Emily already has a sense of the value of studying history to inform  decisions today. Her essay and scrapbook entry focused on the contributions of a historical figure who was new to her, Clara Barton. She noted, “People can be influential…and I wish 2008 presidential candidates who are all saying that they are going to help us would look to leaders of the past who actually did it.”

Antarrah Crawley
Rising 10th grader

When Antarrah received word of his scholarship, his reaction was just as enthusiastic, but he expressed a different expectation for camp weeks. “This is great. I like to write and make movies and really use my artistic mind in the summer.” Fortunately, the program can meet his needs as well as rigorous field days along the Route 15 Corridor--which are followed by creative lab sessions where students produce original vodcasts, with an emphasis on original. Themes, music, photographs, video, sound and script are all student generated. In some cases, they capture the information while visiting the heritage sites with their iPods, and digital and video cameras. In other cases they are caught hovering in quiet places to think, write and edit. Their final product is a state of the art vodcast that explores the lessons of leadership learned along the Journey and how those lessons inform their decisions and apply to their contemporary world.