BELFAST, Maine — Five years ago, Larkspur Morton thought it was the end of the road for the Belfast-based Audubon Expedition Institute, an alternative education program that had inspired young people since the late 1960s.
Funding for the experiential learning program was cut in 2010 by Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which had long provided its accreditation. It seemed to Morton, a longtime faculty member, that the school buses students used to travel the country as they dove deep into subjects like sustainability would be parked for good.
“A student said once that this is like human school,” she said recently. “The skills that people get from this kind of program are useful in every aspect of life.”
Because of that strong connection, Morton and others have been working for five years to revive the program, even pulling together a trial 10-day student expedition in 2013. Now they have found a new partner with Marlboro College in Marlboro, Vermont. That means the school buses filled with undergraduate students will hit the roads again this fall.
Students and faculty will again live and learn together, traveling in one of two custom retrofitted school buses, eating, sleeping and studying outdoors while exploring local and global environmental challenges, according to the program’s website.
Morton is the director of the new program, which has been renamed the Expedition Education Institute and is still based in Belfast. She said they also are very close to offering a graduate program again, and definitely will be offering a gap year option for students who have graduated from high school.
“It’s really positive, good stuff,” she said. “We are moving into full-swing to be recruiting students.”
The first fall semester has students studying hydro and wind power in the Green Mountains and Adirondacks of the northeast, hydrofracking and its impact on communities in New York and Pennsylvania, coal mining in West Virginia and Kentucky, and further exploration of environmental justice and energy issues in the Gulf Coast.
Ellen McColloch-Lovell, president of Marlboro College, said most of the college’s students are deeply concerned with environmental and sustainability issues and the expedition program is a good fit for them.
“‘Will our planet survive and if so, how?’ has been one of the central questions of their lives,” she said. “The bus program, with its intensive living and learning curriculum, has a proven track record of creating thoughtful and effective ecological leaders.”
Students do not have to be currently attending Marlboro College to take part in one of the programs, for which they can receive a semester’s worth of college credits.
The program started in Vermont in the late 1960s as an alternative high school program, a product of its counter-culture era, Morton said. By 1980, the traveling high school had caught the attention of the National Audubon Society and Lesley University, which joined forces with it and offered an accredited college program they named the Audubon Expedition Institute. Over the years, the program changed its homebase from Vermont to Maine, settling in Belfast in 1992. There the independent nonprofit program grew.
“It was on a trajectory to be a stand alone college that was accredited,” Morton said. “It’s a big deal.”
In 2003, former executive director Wilson Hess went before the Belfast City Council to ask its support as institute officials searched for a campus in the city, according to BDN archives. He told Belfast officials that the Audubon Expedition Institute had 40 employees, a $2 million budget and an annual payroll of $1.1 million.
The councilors expressed their desire to have the institution remain in Belfast and expand its offerings.
“It was a big vision that required a lot of infrastructure and money,” Morton said. “The vision just overshot the resources. The growth didn’t happen as fast as it needed to.”
Things changed quickly, she said. Hess left in September 2003, and by 2004, the Audubon Expedition Institute ceased to be an independent nonprofit and just became part of Lesley University. Although Lesley maintained a small office in Belfast, with a couple of employees, it was a far cry from the vibrant nonprofit that had brought many progressive people to the midcoast city.
The institute, however, continued to provide great opportunities for the students. They still traveled around the country on the buses, sleeping in tents and holding classes outside.
“One morning we got up early to watch the sunrise and went to a rocky river bed,” Morton recalled. “I remember students saying: ‘I’m in school? This is class?’ And I remember thinking: ‘This is my job. I get to be here in this gorgeous sunrise for my work.’
“And yet, it’s really challenging,” Morton said. “It makes you grow. It’s challenging to live with 20 other people. To ask for what you actually need. To learn how to compromise and collaborate and take care of yourself at the same time.”
The adventures stopped in 2010 when Lesley University cut funding. For now, Morton and Neal Taylor, her partner, will be among the four faculty members running the Belfast-based program. Morton expects the bus trips to include Maine locations on the itinerary.
“There’s a lot of inspiring people here,” she said.
Taylor said he feels very good about the new relationship with Marlboro College, which seems like a good fit for the school buses and the program.
“There’s just too many people who really believe in and love the program” to let it go, he said recently. “I think the rebirth of the program is really due to the fact that there is a large base of alumni and ex-faculty who refused to let it die.”