PORTLAND (AP) – Casco Bay High School is an Outward Bound school, but you won’t find students rappelling walls, scaling tall trees or pitching tents.

Focused on Outward Bound’s principles of learning by doing, character growth and teamwork, the newest high school in Maine’s biggest city is one of the growing number of so-called expeditionary learning schools nationwide.

Teachers hope the Outward Bound spin on education will appeal to students who don’t thrive in a conventional classroom setting.

Kristina Madjerac, a 15-year-old freshman, was bored and got poor grades when attending a traditional school last year. As the first year of the new school winds down, her education now means something to her, and she has the good grades to prove it.

“The first time I brought home my report card, my dad asked, Did you forge this?”‘ she said on a recent day at the school.

The school offers steady doses of community involvement and real-life experiences. While those things occur at most schools, they tend to do so sporadically; at expeditionary schools, the approach is woven into the teaching framework.

This spring, groups of students built robotic vehicles and machines and programmed them to roll in a straight line, lift things and perform other functions. The exercise aimed to teach students how people are affected when machines do the work.

The activity was tied into the school’s broader focus of the trimester – which was the topic of work, and what work should be overall and for people individually.

Each course – whether it be science, math, humanities or language – tied its studies during the trimester into the overarching theme of work.

A humanities class, for instance, included a case study of Wal-Mart and the company’s impact on employees and communities.

Students also spend much of their time in the field.

While studying Portland’s waterfront earlier this year, they visited wharfs, a fish auction and a marine research institute and met with scientists and fishermen. They went deep-sea fishing to gain a better understanding of the port’s fishing industry.

This trimester they will visit a Wal-Mart distribution center to get a firsthand view of how it works, and meet with business leaders in the community.

The approach encourages collaboration and makes learning relevant by tying it to the world outside school, said science teacher Anne Brown.

“The classes don’t seem so random,” Brown said. “They’re interconnected, which is like real life.”

The first Outward Bound schools, including a middle school in Portland, opened in 1992. There are now 145 of them in 29 states, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.

The Casco Bay High School opened last fall under the roof of another school in Portland’s school system. It has 84 freshmen, and will add a grade a year until there are about 400 students in four grades for the 2008-09 school year.

Funding came from a grant that Outward Bound received from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support the development of 20 new expeditionary learning high schools.

There’s already a waiting list for a new expeditionary elementary school that will open in Portland this fall. When that school opens, Portland will become one of a handful of school districts nationwide to offer the approach from kindergarten through 12th grade.

The schools work with Expeditionary Learning Schools Outward Bound, which is part of Outward Bound USA, based in Garrison, N.Y.

Greg Farrell, the program president and one of its founders, said he first got the idea of applying the Outward Bound concept to schools when he attended an Outward Bound wilderness program in Colorado in 1963. He was in his 20s.

Back then, Outward Bound was viewed as a once-in-a-lifetime, transformational experience. As Farrell did things like climb mountains and slide down a glacier, he came up with the idea of replicating the experience on a daily basis in school.

“I thought, My gosh, somebody ought to teach algebra like this,” he said.

Expeditionary learning is one of many tools to tap into students’ varied learning styles – whether they be honor roll students, middle-of-the-road students or “reluctant learners,” said Mary Jo O’Connor, superintendent of Portland schools.

The approach offers a stark contrast to the teaching of yesteryear, when students consumed information and spit it back, O’Connor said.

Fifteen-year-old Tara Clark said her mother forced her attend to Casco Bay High School.

She realized her mom was right when she talked to friends at Portland’s other high schools who told her they were studying about Greece, but were bored because they were just reading about it out of a textbook.

At her school, Greek studies included putting on a Greek play, going on an archaeological dig and having a camp-out at the school to learn about astronomy and look at the stars the way early Greek star gazers might have.

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On the Net:

Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound: www.elob.org/

AP-ES-06-04-06 1117EDT