Environmental awareness infuses the Olney curriculum and co-curricular life. It is also the exclusive subject of a year-long course taught by Leonard Guindon ’70. While enrollment is open to all students, the class often functions as a capstone for seniors.

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This spring, I interviewed three Olney Friends School students – all rising seniors – from Rwanda, along with several young alumni and other supporters of the school from this small country in east central Africa. I invited them to reflect on life at Olney, their hopes for Rwanda, and the preparation Olney offers students for study in college and in the exploration of vocation.

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Poems pasted on colorful sheets of construction paper tacked to the walls of the Main Building; poems read by students and faculty at morning Collection; poems strategically placed on lunch tables; a reading by award-winning poet Talvikki Ansel. The campus was saturated in lyric verse in observance of National Poetry Month in April.

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Poet Kahlil Gibran wrote that “work is love made visible.” For many at Olney, this captures the philosophy of service by which students are invited to take on a wide variety of significant leadership roles on campus.

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Each student finds a different path through the college search process.

At Olney, support is offered to both juniors and seniors – everything from a road trip to sample the different types of colleges and universities, to standardized test prep, to individual attention from college counselor and humanities teacher Promise Partner.

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“It’s just a nice place to get away,” says Alix Generous ’10 about the new tire swing in the Girls Woods behind the Main Building. The swing was built and installed by the Class of 2010 as their senior gift. In addition, the class spent an afternoon clearing winter storm debris from the woods.

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In late March, a group of students studying the history of Olney in an elective course led the community in commemorating the 100th anniversary of the fire that destroyed the Main Building.

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Widely credited as the father of earth-sheltered design, architect Malcolm “Mac” Wells passed away in November 2009. His imprint is still very much felt at the Raven Rocks community about 15 miles from the Olney Friends School campus, where he designed one home, expansions to a nineteenth-century farmhouse, and an as-yet-unfinished education center.

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In the five-year span from 2004 to 2009, eight Olney alumni have gone on to study at Haverford College, a top-ranked liberal arts school founded by the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and located outside of Philadelphia. Four of their stories are profiled here.

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Why does the tulip poplar – with its yellow, green, and orange flowers – grow in southern Appalachia and in southeast China, but nowhere else in the world? Why is there such extraordinary biodiversity in the rounded hills and hollows of the Appalachian mountains? How does a jack-in-the-pulpit decide whether to breed as a female or as a male each spring when it emerges through the forest floor?

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“It was almost something that could really happen – but it wasn’t. It touched on things you normally wouldn’t expect – like a little-known wormhole in the Midwest and a secret club based on a dead dinosaur.” This is how Susan Field describes The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, Reif Larsen’s first novel.

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The phone rings and rings in the office of music teacher and community service coordinator Ben Irie. Word is spreading around Barnesville, Ohio and the surrounding area that high schoolers from Olney Friends School are looking for ways to help others and have fun while doing so.

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Gardener Jessica Bilecki spent a week in early January in the northern Ethiopian highlands volunteering in the Kossoye region. The main focus of the visit, she explains, was to help the community increase its ability to provide for its own food needs and to improve nutrition.

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“I'm deeply implicated,” says John Rockwell. "I'm mindful that whenever we flip a switch in the house, we are burning a lump of coal." John '56 and Wanda (Edgerton) Rockwell '56 live in an 1892 home to which two additions have been added – one in 1980 and the other in 2007. Earlier this fall, their home on the Raven Rocks property near Beallsville, about 15 miles from the school, was undermined by Century Mine. John used to earn his livelihood as an engineer working for a coal mining equipment company.

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“We decided since we couldn&rsqou;t take elementary and middle school kids into the wilderness in large numbers, we would have to bring the wilderness to them,” says Dave Freeman, co–founder of Wilderness Classroom, a nonprofit organization dedicated to inspiring a love of the natural world and a sense of environmental stewardship in young people.

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