To the Editor:

Regarding the Jan. 14 article, “Adirondack land and cobblestone school of no use to modern GCSD,” some Guilderland families will remember the Outdoor Team for middle school students.

Kids got onto the team through a lottery. Each student was given an army helmet liner and expected to come to school with clothes that could get muddy. There were outside activities every day and once a month, throughout the school year, a campout.

The highlights of the year were the fall and spring weekends on the school’s property at Sacandaga where they camped, waded through waist-high mud, scampered up hills, and rode inner tubes down the Sacandaga River. Families were encouraged to take their children hiking, skiing, and fishing.

There was even a summer trip where Outdoor Team families spent a week hiking, camping, and fishing in the Pemigewasset Wilderness Area in the White Mountains. By today’s standards of hyper-caution, some of the activities were insanely dangerous.

For some kids, their year in the Outdoor Team was the best of their Guilderland education. Three of my children participated and my youngest first walked during an Outdoor Team campout.

Outdoor Team activities were documented in a newsletter called Dear Wolfie. The program suffered a devastating blow when the charismatic teacher and leader of the team, Bruce Sleeper, was removed from the school in handcuffs.

The decision to sell the Sacandaga property is probably wise. An unlikely resurrected Outdoor Team could function perfectly well without GCSD owning a remote parcel of land in Saratoga County.

The cobblestone schoolhouse in Guilderland Center, however, could have a great deal of value in educating students about architecture; archaeology; and the legal, social, and pedagogical history of Guilderland.  

Simon Litten

Altamont

Editor’s note: Bruce Sleeper pleaded guilty to second-degree sodomy in 1989 after five girls in his sixth-grade class at Farnsworth Middle School complained to their health teacher that Sleeper made them “uncomfortable” with things he did and said.