POLAND — A long winter awaited in the woods behind Poland Spring Resort. The only hope for survival: two delicious beans.

The kids-turned-squirrels had 30 seconds to find them.

“If you didn’t get two, you die,” warned Philip Mathieu, as about half a dozen New Hampshire sixth-graders scattered, peeking under leaves and logs and laughed at themselves.

The same beans they were now so desperate for? They’d hidden them moments before, and some promptly lost them.

“Allison, you were so close, and Olivia’s died, as well,” Mathieu said. “If you’re a dead squirrel, you don’t need beans anymore because you’re decomposing peacefully.”

So, on to the next lesson.

While its new, permanent home is being built in southern Maine, The Ecology School is in Poland for a year.

The Saco-based school has taught more than 180,000 students over 20 years, many of them in its overnight program for third- through eighth-graders across New England.

Alex Grindle, director of programs, said the group bought River Bend Farm on the Saco River after its lease with the Ferry Beach Park Association ended. A new dorm and dining hall aren’t ready yet, so for the first time, the program moved off-campus.

Poland Spring Resort had housing, trails, a mix of ecosystems, a chef receptive to family-style dining and “it was sort of a mutually beneficial opportunity because their primary season is weekends and summer and we do school programs in the fall and the spring during the week, so there’s just a really nice opportunity for us to be able to work together,” Grindle said.

The school averages just over 100 students a week and they started arriving for overnights, which last up to four nights, last week.

“Our primary focus is to get kids outside and learning about the connections between and amongst themselves and the environment around them,” she said.

“For many students that don’t necessarily succeed in the classroom, this can be a really great opportunity for them to see themselves anew as a learner in a new environment, and to succeed in that renews faith in themselves.”

Lessons have names such as the ABC’s of Ecology and FBI Maine (Fungus, Bacteria and Invertebrates). After exploring during the day, they head back out at night to look at the sky and talk about Earth’s place in the universe or observe how the forest comes alive differently after dark.

A lot of the schools they work with have incorporated The Ecology School into the science curriculum, Grindle said.

“When students are here, they’re away from screens and they don’t have their phones,” she said. “For some kids, particularly the older kids, they walk away with some deeper understanding of the world around them, but also deeper understanding of the people around them because they’ve interacted in different ways.”

They are led by 11 seasonal educators, including Mathieu, who started the morning dressed as a bright-green foam tree, talking with educators dressed as a squirrel and a garbage collector about good trash and bad trash, consumers and decomposers.

Lessons are in small, high-energy bites: pacing out the length of the branches on a tall tree, learning how gray squirrels hide their food compared to red squirrels.

They are also, at least with Mathieu, filled with song, with students repeating each line after him as they marched behind him, headed to the bean game.

“It starts with an ‘S’ and ends with a ‘T.’ It comes out of you and it comes out of me.”

Relax. It’s just scat.

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