Roy L Hales/Cortes Currents - The 2022/2023 semester is now over and the Cortes Island Academy is preparing for a Forest Ecology Semester in 2023/2024.

“We have now officially taken this program from pilot to an actual ongoing program All of this could only happen at this speed, where we went from idea to actually having a pilot program in a year because of our amazing partnership with School District 72, the leadership of Dr. Jeremy Morrow, the superintendent and our awesome partnership with the school teacher, Jeff Lontayao, who was there for the whole process last year,” said Manda Aufochs Gillespie.

MAG: “ This first semester or half a year of the Cortes Island Academy just blew us away. Both blew away our expectations and also presented way more challenges than people on the ground could even begin to imagine, because largely this has been started and came out of the hopes and dreams of Cortes Island, not necessarily professional educators who knew all the things that we were going to be facing.”

“It has been so touching to experience 20 students saying things like, 'I have been transformed by this educational experience.' Students across the board saying things like 'they have never had an educational experience that felt so relevant to their lives.' We see students who in many cases had not been in school before, or had dropped out of school, or who had been in school for a long time and had begun to think that school was not made for them. So that was really powerful.”

“The other thing that's been powerful, and it's been happening more recently, are young adults who've come to me and said, 'Hey, I have to tell you how amazing it is that this is happening because I grew up on the island and when I got to middle school or high school age, I felt like the world was telling me that I didn't belong on Cortes anymore, that I didn't belong in my home community, that I was wrong to want to be there, that it wasn't the place for me.' They felt sent away and it had repercussions that lasted into their adulthood. Feeling like they were sent away from their homes and had to find a way to come back, or be relevant, or get back into a community that had been so powerful to them."

“I really hope that people listening to this story will take a moment to go to the Cortes Island Academy.ca website because there's a couple of things there that are just incredible. If you go to the 2022/ 2023 program part of the website, which is under the ‘About’ section, you can experience the podcasts that the students did. All the students in the program participated in personal podcasts as well as journalistic podcasts as part of a series that the students named Ripple Effect. That's really incredible to listen to. They all participated in the making of three videos in partnership with Reel Youth, our locally based film project, and those videos are also amazing. It's both an opportunity to see the world through the perspective of young people today, but also to see in many cases another side of Cortes and the people who live there. Really powerful stuff. I hope everyone will take a moment to experience that.”

“The other place I would encourage people to go visit is the Change Makers part of the website, where you can start looking at the impact that our first year program had. So this program in our first year, we had a mix of local students that were coming from other rural and remote communities. The rural remote community part of who came is by far the largest number. Then we had some students who came from as far away as Germany and Indonesia, or just the more urbanized places such as Vancouver as well, but the vast majority were these rural and remote students.”