RENSSELAERVILLE — A program designed to stimulate and challenge young minds outside the classroom — now in its fourth decade — is moving into the future under different auspices and a new director.

The Carey Institute for Global Good has launched a fundraising effort called Lynda and Linda’s Education Fund to ensure that  the work of Linda Borock, the program’s director since 1999, and Lynda Blankenship, one of the program’s longest-serving and most active volunteer-mentors,  is carried forward after their recent retirement. The theme of the effort is “Continuing a legacy of extraordinary mentorship for local kids.”

The program of day-long, project-based learning experiences was begun in 1983 by Mary Ann Ronconi at the Rensselaerville Institute, the predecessor to the Carey Institute at the hilltop campus. The Rensselaerville Institute moved its base of operations to smaller quarters in Delmar in 2011. After that, the  campus continued to host most of the day-long project-based workshops, hosted by The Carey Institute.

Now gradually assuming management of the program,  The Carey Institute says more than 33,000 students from  the Capital Region and beyond have participated in the program since its inception.

Although staffed by volunteer mentors, the program — it has been known as Minds On but is now nameless until such time as the Carey Institute renames it — needs funding.  It pays transportation costs or shares them with the schools that send students; awards scholarships to hard-pressed schools; supplies project materials,  and  serves lunch to the visiting young scholars.

Alison Miller, a longtime mentor for the program, is becoming its director.

Equal learning opportunity

Borock, who hails from Brooklyn, retired in 1993 from teaching at the Chapin School, a private girls school in Manhattan.  Blankenship, also a native New Yorker, taught at another private school, Regis High School, in the city.  Together, the two women have dedicated many of their retirement years, in this hamlet, to the program that Borock says is needed now more than ever.

“We have always tried to bring kids  together from different kinds of schools: urban and inner-city, suburban, and rural. It’s an egalitarian experience,” she say,  the kind she feels too few students have these days.

She feels too that the field trip and intensive learning can liberate students not just from their daily routine but from an educational environment that may have become too test- oriented.

“It gets the kids out of the classroom, “ she says, “to immerse them in hands-on learning.”

She adds, “The mentors challenge them, encourage them to try things with no penalty for failure. They aren’t being graded or judged.”

Many cash-strapped schools have cut back on extramural learning excursions, Borock says, which makes the Carey program a  doable way to get kids out into the world to experience learning differently.

“Amazing transformation”

Borock has watched many groups arrive for their day away from school.

“The atmosphere of school fades away and an amazing transformation occurs as they walk through the door,” she says. The children find themselves in a place that looks and feels like a small liberal arts college.

“When they walk in, they’re excited but in a mature way,” Borock says. She agrees that they may feel privileged to be there. “They feel important and rise to the occasion, even during lunch!”

“Someone has taken a chance on them,” she thinks may be the way they feel. “When they leave at the end of the day, the kids want to go back and learn.”

“The program was unique when it started all those years ago, “ Borock says. “It still is.”

“Education has become so much more structured than it was then. At the same time, the difference from district to district has widened.

“Look at the list of top 10 schools in the area,” she observes,”it never changes.”

She views anything that “helps level the playing field” as a step in the right direction. “We need to be aware of this [inequality] and give students an opportunity.”

Fulfilling retirement

Borock moved to Rensselaerville full-time after her retirement from Chapin in 1994. In 1999,  her son who lives in the area, encouraged her  to apply for the open director’s position at Minds On.

She had had budgeting responsibilities at Chapin and administrative experience as president of the United States Fencing Association.

Lynda Blankenship brought to the program years of teaching upper-level science and engineering courses.  Descriptions of the Minds On workshops she mentored describe a day full of challenge.  The “Beyond pi” workshop asked students to “connect mathematics to the real world through thinking, modeling and problem solving. Calculators required.”

“Engineer It!” packed a lot into a day: “Working solo and in teams, with supplied materials, students will be structural engineers competing for big contracts,” the course description reads, “Imaginations will be challenged as they must design and build land and water structures.”

Clearly, not just a day in the country.

Other workshops have included DNA Profiling, Creative Writing, and Ethics: The Law and Science.

Teacher accompany their students to the workshops and observe.  “Teachers in public schools work very hard,” Borock says. “They have so much to deal with...neighborhoods changing around them….new demands….Yet they often get great results.’

She says it is not uncommon to see teachers leave a workshop feeling “they can’t wait to get back to the classroom.”  They’re inspired by what they have seen and how their students have reacted and participated.

The program also occasionally sponsors teacher workshops, like one designed to introduce teachers to DNA technology.

Although some program mentors are teachers, many are not. A journalist, a judge and a couple who teach history through music are among the non-teacher mentors who also try to challenge students in new ways.

Time to retire, again

Borock reflected on why now seems a good time to retire.

“I do believe we had the optimum skills for a particular time ...We were very energized by that time and space,” she says.

“I don’t think of Skyping or texting,” she says, as she reflects on our changing times. “I don’t think we could do the job as we did in the past. It was time to retire.”

“Linda and Lynda have spent years offering experimental opportunities to Capital Region kids,” says the Carey fundraising appeal for carrying on their legacy.

The fundraising goal is modest: $5,000. But ambitions for the program — as were Linda’s and Lynda’s — remain large.

To contribute, visit: http://careyinstitute.org/l-and-l/