Deborah M. Walter

"Pack It & Cache It 4 Life" is an innovative high school outdoor adventure fitness youth mentoring program for at-risk teens. Walter provides students with positive opportunities to work through barriers in supportive environments; she hopes they can then transfer those acquired skills to challenging situations in their lives. These adventure activities build confidence in at-risk students who have low self-esteem, motivation issues and false perceptions that "failure is their only option." The program improves student learning by providing immediate and concrete consequences through personal outdoor challenges that are experimental and exciting. Students develop a basic level of competency utilizing outdoor recreational equipment such as setting up tents, searching for hidden items using a Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) handheld unit and abiding by the cooking "leave no trace" camping principles. Additional objectives for this project will be to establish social, emotional and physical competencies included in the National Association of Sport and Physical Education standards for high school physical education. The skills learned by students during this project will promote and enhance responsible personal behavior and stimulate options for recreational engagement out of school. Walter is a resident of Bella Vista.