Why a 55-mile trek is a mandatory rite of passage for freshmen at one high school

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Newark, New Jersey — The New Jersey metropolis of Newark is nary nationalist park. For many, the lone sights are the bumpers up portion sitting successful traffic, and the lone hikes are astatine the whim of a locomotion sign.

Yet here, of each places, is St. Benedict's Preparatory School, a backstage precocious schoolhouse that requires students to measurement mode extracurricular their municipality comfortableness zone.

The students, galore of whom person ne'er been hiking oregon camping, are sent to the Appalachian Trail for 5 days with lone "some big supervision," according to St. Benedict's Prep schoolhouse head Glenn Cassidy, who said he's "willing to enactment money" that St. Benedict's is the lone schoolhouse successful the U.S. with specified a program.

"[There is] immoderate big supervision, determination mightiness beryllium immoderate security companies watching close now," Cassidy joked to CBS News. "But, yeah, the teams mostly hike independently."

The programme is simply a mandatory rite of transition for each freshmen. They commencement grooming successful aboriginal outpouring with workout and teambuilding. Then they are breached into smaller units with a captain, a campy specialist, navigators, cooks and medics.

Each pupil is trained successful a specialty, but nary of them cognize everything they request to survive.

"We'll larn however to enactment unneurotic successful antithetic ways and decorativeness the task astatine hand," 1 pupil preparing to implicit the hike past period said.

Why a 55-mile trek is simply a mandatory rite of transition for freshmen astatine 1 precocious schoolhouse

"The thought is that they person to trust connected 1 another," Cassidy explained. "The lone mode we tin get done this is if we enactment unneurotic and marque it there."

The 55-mile trek is present a 53-year contented astatine St. Benedict's. They bash it radiance oregon rain. In fact, the medication really prefers rain.

"When beingness gets difficult, it's thing you tin notation backmost to," Cassidy said. "You know, there's a batch of rainy days successful life."

In a satellite of chopper parenting, this schoolhouse inactive makes students emergence connected their own. And erstwhile they do, it is rather a sight. After 5 days of ups and downs, the students finished their hike successful May and officially became sophomores.

Some were bruised. All were weary. Their shoes volition ne'er beryllium the same. But neither volition they, which was the existent destination each along.

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