Ridgefield schools mark 50 years with weeklong Cispus camp

While other districts have cut back outdoor education programs, the Cispus trip is woven into the Ridgefield School District’s legacy. Great-grandchildren of the district staffers who founded the program are now the ones learning to build fires and shelters. Past campers often return as counselors while in high school and later as volunteers.

“Anyone who has been in Ridgefield lately can see we’ve exploded in population,” said Laurie Gray-Pritchard, who like Pintler, teaches at Sunset Ridge Intermediate School. “This trip is a way for all the new families coming in to be part of a Ridgefield legacy dating back 50 years.”

It’s also a way to get kids outdoors, something that’s harder to do with the omnipresence of technology in students’ lives. Starting in second grade, the district issues students Chromebooks. Many start carrying cellphones in elementary school.

At Cispus, a nonprofit led by the Association of Washington School Principals under a lease-agreement with the U.S. Forest Service, kids spend time learning, exploring and just being kids in the woods.

“It’s outdoor school; the kids still learn,” Gray-Pritchard said. “It’s not just a week to run and play outside, although that is a big part of it. We’re trying to get them to love the outdoors.”

A day at Cispus

While the campers remained civilized throughout the trip, you put a bunch of fifth graders in the woods and there are going to be some “Lord of the Flies” type moments.

While one group was at a fire-building class, the students’ conversation centered on how quickly things would devolve into cannibalism if they were truly lost in nature. Then they spotted another group’s fire and tried to figure out how they could steal it.

However, no fire was stolen nor kids eaten on the trip. The students are supervised. Their day starts at 7:30 a.m. until lights-out in the cabin at 9 p.m. There are 40-plus high school students on the trip working as counselors, 10 classroom teachers, two paraeducators and close to 20 community volunteers, Gray-Pritchard said.

Sunset Ridge Principal Todd Graves, who coordinates the trip, said Cispus days have a few core classes, such as hiking, water testing and wilderness survival skills. Recently, the district added electives on the life cycle of salmon and astronomy, among other topics.

The camp encourages making new friends by placing students from different classrooms and schools together in bunkhouses.

“I didn’t know a lot of people at first,” Braiden Brown said a few days into the trip. “Now I know everybody in my cabin and everybody in the camp.”

Whitney Lutz said it took her a few days, but she made new friends from her cabin, especially when they made a fort using blankets and bunk beds.

Each night ends with the entire camp singing around a campfire.

“There’s real health benefits in life to having connections to outdoors,” Graves said. “For a lot of our kids, I think that Cispus might be the first opportunity — and for some of them, sadly –the last opportunity to sit around a campfire and sing songs with other kids.”

Legacies of the trip

Graves has fond memories of his own time at Cispus when he was a fifth grader at Union Ridge Elementary School.

“It was a much smaller group of kids, so we had Family Night the last night of camp,” he said. “Families could drive up and join the campfire. I remember meeting my mom and dad in parking lot and showing them the camp and then performing skits in front of them.”

This year’s trip was the first for Tyson Ainsworth as a counselor. The Ridgefield High School senior attended as a fifth grader, and said he was amazed when he returned to Cispus.

“As a kid, it feels so much bigger,” he said. “Seeing it now, you realize that things are a little bit closer than they feel. I thought this place was huge.”

Billy Yaddof, 55, brought a piece of his history at Cispus with him: a wood cookie he earned when he was a camper in fifth grade. He doesn’t remember what it was for, but it has “H2O” written on it, so he thinks it was some sort of water study class.

Wood cookies are circular wood necklaces counselors give out to campers who do well at different activities. Campers also receive a cookie with their name on it. Yaddof is in charge of making the 1,000-plus wood cookies handed out at the trip, and said he keeps coming back as a volunteer because it’s fun to see the campers grow.

“They show up kind of scared and unsure about things,” he said. “They grow more confident as the week goes on. You see that in the counselors, too.”

Yaddof is in his 10th year as a community volunteer after all three of his daughters went through the program.

Those family connections are another reason the trip has persisted for five decades. Allene Wodaege helped found the trip with former Union Ridge Principal John Hudson Sr. in 1969. Hudson’s granddaughter, Kristin Hudson, remembers going as a fifth grader, as well as all of her sisters, nieces and nephews over the years.

This year, John Hudson’s great-granddaughter Natalie Mire attended. Her mother said Natalie eagerly anticipated taking the trip without her family. She came home raving about the natural beauty of the hikes and the fun she had hanging out with her new friends.

“It’s a special thing for Ridgefield,” Kristin Hudson said. “(My grandfather) had a big belief in environmental education. He came here and wanted to get something going for kids to go out into the woods.”

Superintendent Nathan McCann is in his sixth year leading the district after coming from Arizona. As soon as he was hired, he had people telling him to go up to Cispus at least for a day that first year.

“It wasn’t difficult to convince me of the trip’s importance,” he said. “I came up for one day, and it just speaks for itself. It’s such a unique feature of our school district.”

Future of the program

How much longer can Ridgefield schools continue offering the Cispus trip? It’s a question a few have asked in recent years as the district and city continue to see rapid growth. Ridgefield’s expanding population made it the fastest-growing city in the state three times since 2015. The growth isn’t expected to stop either. Earlier this year, McCann said the district anticipates adding 1,760 new students in the next five years. The district finished the most recent school year with about 3,150 students.

“I understand why a district like Vancouver can’t do something like this. There’s just too many kids,” McCann said.

This year, more than 240 fifth graders went on the trip, all but roughly 20 students, Gray-Pritchard said. Last year, nearly 230 students attended. Money for the trip comes from students and the district’s enrichment levy. This year, students paid $130 to attend the trip, up from $120 last school year.

According to information from the district, last year’s trip cost $77,772, with $27,400 coming from the students participating. Bills for this year’s trip are still coming in, so the cost hasn’t yet been tabulated.

McCann and plenty of others in the community are committed to making sure Ridgefield fifth graders for generations to come will have the chance to go to Cispus.

“This is something kids get less and less of,” McCann said. “There’s so much time connected to devices both in the classroom and at home. Even if a beautiful place like Ridgefield, we don’t do a good enough job to get kids outside like we do here.”