Next spring, Community Prep's 7th graders will spend three days with farmers and naturalists at The Farm School in Athol, Massachusetts.  While there, the students find value in real work, create community that persists when they return to their classrooms, and experience first hand what it means to be a steward of the earth.  It's simple -- but it's magical.  For most of these students, it is their first time away from the inner-city, where the only dirt they normally see is in their back yard.  

Students are fully integrated into the farm operations, rising early for milking, tending to the garden, fields and forests, and helping to cook meals with the food they have harvested. By the time they leave, the farm is theirs.  One seventh grader, upon returning from the trip, said “There is no way to express how I ache to go back to the Farm School, except to say that I would give up videogames for it.”

The farm itself is 130 acres, with about 40 acres of open land and 90 acres of woods.  It is an incredibly productive place, with large vegetable gardens designed to help feed all that come, young orchards, a maple sugaring operation, a dairy with up to 12 cows milking that ships milk to a local coop, pigs being produced for Cambridge, Massachusetts restaurants, goats, chickens, oxen and a lovely work horse named Mack.