A little while back I got a call from another local outdoor school asking if they could come talk to us and pick our brains to help them figure out some of their current staffing and scheduling issues. The cynical and business-minded side of me thought “Why would we want to share our success with a direct competitor?” There are other Outdoor Schools in southern California, and if they take our ideas they might take our business.

I thought for a while. I took a look at our program and realized that a lot of what works well for us here at High Trails has stemmed from other peoples ideas. If you have worked in Outdoor Education for a while and take a look through our lesson plans you’ll be sure to see some familiar activities. Deciding that we were all on the same team, I invited them up to our site for a visit and discussion.

They had lots of questions about our scheduling, administrative structure, incentive program, pay scale, and our staff development and evaluation program. I was happy to share our ideas. In reality, most of them are already out there on our website for all to see.

Beyond that I was proud to talk about what we do here and how we treat our staff. I proudly showed them our “Support Web”, an internal website currently boasting 1,991 files with guides, documents and videos; making up all the inner workings of High Trails. I stopped short of offering a copy, but allowed them to take ideas and goals.

Our commitment to evaluate and improve is the source of all of our policies. Just like teachers should adapt to the needs of their students, as managers we need to adapt to the needs of our staff.

While the way we manage our staff may seem complicated (with 6 types of evaluations, several incentive programs, and a variety of inservices and meetings throughout each week), it’s much simpler in the long run to have a good system.

All we do is meet the needs of our staff, give them opportunity for improvement, and recognize their success.

Do I feel that I gave too much away? No, I sincerely hope that the information I was able to share helped create a stronger staff for our neighbors. At High Trails, we take plenty of ideas from other sources so it felt good to give back to another member of the OE community.

There is certainly room in the market for other outdoor schools and having competition pushes us to continue to improve our own program.

After all, the logo on my shirt reminds me of our motto: “Learning How We Can ALL Fit Together On One Healthy Planet”.

At High Trails Outdoor Science School, we literally force our instructors to write about elementary outdoor education, teaching outside, learning outside, our dirty classroom (the forest…gosh), environmental science, outdoor science, and all other tree hugging student and kid loving things that keep us engaged, passionate, driven, loving our job, digging our life, and spreading the word to anyone whose attention we can hold for long enough to actually make it through reading this entire sentence. Whew…. www.dirtyclassroom.com