It’s a long journey from equatorial Africa and southeast Asia to the snow-capped mountains of North America, but Maine-based WinterKids is easing the transition for hundreds of immigrant families in the Portland, Me., area. WinterKids, the passport program that has branched out into a variety of educational efforts, has recently added non-traditional populations to its target audience. WinterKids also exploits public concern over childhood obesity and unhealthy lifestyles to reach into the schools. All these steps complement WinterKids’ more typical passport programs.

Founder and executive director Carla Marcus, who won a 2005 SAMMY Award for her efforts and vision, has crafted a seven-pronged program to help children and their families become active outdoors in the winter.

New WinterKids programs such as Welcome to Winter and SnowSchool complement industry efforts to reach people who have historically escaped snowsports’ traditional feeder system. “The beauty of Welcome to Winter and SnowSchool is that we can target whatever population we want to,” says Marcus. By working through the school system, “The issue of ‘will it reach them?’ is taken care of,” she says.


Targeted Educational Programs
The idea of reaching out to immigrant populations began in Portland, Maine’s largest (population 70,000) and most ethnically diverse city. Recent immigrants have come from Somalia, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Laos and Uganda. Coincidentally, Portland is also where WinterKids and the Ski Maine Association share an office.

When Portland board of education officials considered implementing the Outdoor Learning Curriculum (details below) last year, they asked for translations into several of the 53 languages spoken in the city’s school system. The request surprised Marcus and her staff. Their response was to create Welcome to Winter, a one-day mini-fair that shows children and parents from Maine’s immigrant communities that snow and cold weather open up opportunities for fun.

WinterKids enlisted the support of the board of education’s Office of Multilingual and Multicultural Programs as well as sponsors L.L. Bean and K2/Tubbs. The free Saturday afternoon fair introduced newcomers to snowshoeing, building snowmen (with ethnic dress) and playing games in the snow, and covered winter basics such as dressing in layers and healthy nutrition. About 200 people attended, including Maine governor John Baldacci and Portland mayor Jill Duson.

The pols helped attract widespread attention among regional media, including a glowing story in the Boston Sunday Globe. Duson, an African-American, was especially supportive, enthusiastically recounting how she and her children had taken up skiing thanks to the WinterKids Passport.

Marcus plans to repeat Welcome to Winter in Portland this season and expand to Lewiston (population 40,000), Maine’s second largest city and home to a growing population of Somali refugees.


SnowSchool Gets an A for Access
WinterKids’ other six programs involve substantial educational components and/or provide access to schools. The main vehicle: the Outdoor Learning Curriculum, a series of active and scholastically challenging outdoor winter lessons. Aligned with the National Education Standards and geared to a wide range of outdoor activities, the curriculum includes 155 pages of lesson plans, assessments, games and safety information encompassing a variety of subjects for grades K-12. It even includes an adaptive component.

Areas across the country have access to the Outdoor Learning Curriculum. “We’ve been offering the Curriculum to the national ski industry for a couple of years because it provides the entry into the schools that they haven’t been able to get before, being a commercial venture,” Marcus says.

The newest program, SnowSchool, involves a challenging scholastic lesson that’s conducted by regular teachers for their own pupils on a field trip to a participating ski area. SnowSchool was successfully tested last winter at two resorts—Sugarloaf, Maine, and Holiday Valley, New York. This fall, Marcus e-mailed the 18-page, two-lesson package to NSAA members to encourage more areas to check it out.

Sugarloaf and Holiday Valley tested the lesson, “How Fast Does the Lift Go?” This teaches applied mathematics and involves collecting, recording, processing, calculating and presenting numerical data about ski lift operations.

At Sugarloaf, five students and their teacher from a fifth grade class toured the terminal of the high-speed Super-Quad. Then the students took turns with stopwatches and clipboards while they counted people, timed chairs and recorded the data. After returning to the classroom, the students worked their numbers through the key formulas and wrote a report that determined the effective loading speed and uphill capacity of Sugarloaf’s lift, plus corollary statistics.

A professor of education in the New York state university system added concepts such as gravity, friction and measuring slope angles to this program and and called it Cool School, which was staged at Holiday Valley. There, 60 pupils and three teachers—the entire fourth grade of the local elementary school—took part. Ski Areas of New York (SANY) executive director Dirk Gouwens helped coordinate the onhill activities.

Gouwens and Holiday Valley marketing director Jane Eshbaugh were ecstatic with the results. “The biggest advantage for the kids is that they get to see that what they do in school really applies to real life,” says Eshbaugh. The two presented the program at the September SANY meeting, and several resorts responded with enthusiasm.

WinterKids’ second pre-packaged lesson involves physics. The title is, “What is the Quality of the Snow?” and it focuses on the effects of temperature and humidity. Shawnee Peak in Bridgton, Maine, plans to host this SnowSchool session this winter. The class will be conducted by local teachers with assistance from a popular Portland TV weatherman and Shawnee snowmakers.

Shawnee marketing director Melissa Rock appreciates the benefit of using a scholastic program to reach non-skiing teachers and kids. Although Shawnee has strong after-school skiing and snowboarding programs, “We don’t really have the arm into the schools to make that happen the way WinterKids does. It’s a great idea for us to go out and use their curriculum to get kids up here to learn that what happens in the classroom has real-life applications,” she says.

Beyond that, she adds, “We want to show that ski areas are businesses and employers in the community. A lot of people, including many adults, can’t put their arms around that, and this will help them realize the link.”


The Rest of the Story
A second new in-school program was launched last season: WinterKids Live! This school assembly program encourages physical activity via songs and games. Originally aimed at elementary schools, WinterKids Live! has been adapted to fairs and other gatherings.

The Active Academics Workshop has a similar fitness goal. WinterKids staffers visit a participating school and play outdoors on snowshoes. The scholastic component includes measuring heart rate and talking about nutrition, but the main focus is on having fun outdoors.

The World Class Athlete Tour is another traveling unit. Prominent sports figures visit schools and present programs that emphasize setting goals and striving for success. Three-time U.S. Olympic skier and Maine native Julie Parisien headlines a team of athletes that includes a minor-league hockey star, a prominent figure skater, a boardercross champion and an Olympic biathlete.


Is Education Good Business?
Gouwens says that the school programs open new markets for skiing and snowboarding in the future, but he concedes that there’s no immediate measurable return for the investment. “That’s obviously our long-term goal, but the measurability is going to be difficult,” he says. “It’s one of those things where you have to go out and do it with some faith and say, ‘I know it’s going to pay off down the road, even though I don’t see it happening in my wallet today.’”