Back to the basics

On most weekday mornings, Kristi Horn is up at 6 a.m.

She tries not to wake her roommate as she gets ready, grabs a backpack and hurries off to class. It's a routine many college freshmen have adjusted to this fall - but Horn is still in high school.

Her classes take place at the base of a hill, a short hike from the house she shares with her teacher, his wife and five other students. Each morning, she walks to class - a short hike, but long enough to make a body shiver. Mornings are chilly up the North Fork, except when they're downright cold.

Thankfully, there's a stack of wood next to a small stove in one corner of the classroom. The

room is really an office with a few chairs arranged in a semicircle in front of a large desk and a small whiteboard on the wall. Jerry Wernick teaches most of his classes here.

The first class of the day begins at 7 a.m. Horn and Michael Taylor are the only students in the room. Together, they comprise the senior class at Tamarack Springs Academy.

Wernick and his wife, Linda, founded the school more than two decades ago. They wanted a break from their teaching jobs in Ronan so they could build a home on their North Fork property. They'd purchased the land, located about five miles north of Polebridge, in 1975 and moved there full time in 1980.

When the school board chairman heard the Wernicks were leaving Ronan, he asked them to tutor his children. He was a pilot with a flying business, and his kids often accompanied him on flights.

He would buzz the house to announce his arrival, and Jerry Wernick would hustle to meet the children in the nearby field that served as a landing strip. The kids would study at the house and then fly home with their father.

It wasn't long before other parents heard about the couple tutoring children up the North Fork. Soon the Wernicks had four pupils. By 1982, they realized they had a full-blown school and formally opened Tamarack Springs Academy.

Within a few years, the school was full, and it has remained full ever since. The Wernicks accept just 10 students each year - a small enough number to board the students on their property.

Children have come from all over the country to study at Tamarack Springs.

Most heard about the school from former students or people who've met the Wernicks. Horn, from Midland, Mich., first heard about the school from her pastor, Jerry Wernick's brother-in-law.

Elise Taylor of Calhoun, Ga., is the third member of her family to attend Tamarack Springs. Her older sister, Shannon, attended the school two years ago. Her brother, Michael, is a senior there this year.

For years, Taylor listened to stories about the small school in the woods and its legendary fall and winter campouts. When she was old enough to attend high school, she knew exactly where she wanted to go.

"I was just like, oh man, I want to go there. It looks so cool!" she said.

This year, she and Eric Kablanow of Coeur d'Alene are the school's only freshmen. There are five sophomores: Jennifer Atkins, from La Center, Wash.; Leighton Sjoren, of Hermiston, Ore.; Chelsi Breen, from Hot Springs; Josh Heater of Wolf Point and Jonathan Fink from Eureka.

Fink's sister applied to Tamarack Springs, but there weren't enough open girls' slots. Girls stay upstairs in the Wernicks' house, and there is only room enough for four.

So each week, Fink's sister travels to the school from Eureka. While the fall weather lasts, she'll drive over Red Meadow Pass, but when winter arrives, she'll have to take the long way through Whitefish to get to school.

Tamarack Springs doesn't advertise at all, Jerry Wernick said. There are students on a waiting list each year; this year alone, there were about 15 applicants for just a few open spots.

"We're not trying to grow," he said. "We're looking for serious-minded kids who want to live by Christian principles."

Most students, like the Wernicks, are Seventh-day Adventists who want to continue the faith-based education they've received during their primary-school years.

Many people in the Seventh-day Adventist church believe parochial education is best, Linda Wernick explained. Larger churches might have their own schools. Parents without access to an Adventist school might opt to home-school their children throughout grade school, then send them to a Seventh-day Adventist high school.

There are a few large Adventist boarding schools, Wernick said - "large" usually meaning a few hundred students at most. Even that many students might be overwhelming for kids who've been home-schooled all their lives, she said, so parents opt instead to send them to a small, homey school like Tamarack Springs.

"I know the parents hate it [sending their children away]," she said. "But everybody's one big family here."

The school's atmosphere is family-like. Everyone eats breakfast and dinner together - the only two meals of the day. They're together nonstop from the first of September through Thanksgiving, when the students go home for a long winter break, and then from January until Memorial Day when the school year ends.

Tempers sometimes flare like they do in any family, Linda Wernick said, but problems are resolved quickly.

"The kids get along amazingly well," she said.

Tamarack Springs even takes a family vacation of sorts. After winter break, those who want to can go on the "senior trip" - so named because the seniors decide the destination.

This year's senior class hasn't yet chosen where to go. Last year's class visited a college in Canada. Other classes have gone to Europe, Mexico and Nicaragua.

"A lot of these kids don't have the opportunity to do much traveling," Linda Wernick said, "especially traveling overseas."

Often the senior trip is a mission trip. Students have served hot soup and bread to the poor in Lithuania and helped build a block house for widows in a small Nicaraguan village.

"Seeing other cultures and how other people have to live lets kids see they really have a lot to be thankful for," Wernick said. "It's good for them to go out and make other people's lives better if they can."

Students aren't required to adhere to the Wernicks' beliefs, but they do receive religious training at the academy. Everyone participates in worship twice a day and observes the Sabbath on Saturday. Bible classes are part of the curriculum at every grade level.

Other classes could just as easily be taught in a public school. In addition to her Bible class, Elise Taylor is taking algebra, English and physical science.

Some normal classes have a unique Tamarack Springs twist. Sophomores learn to type not on a computer keyboard but on an old-fashioned typewriter, even though most students bring their own laptop computers from home. Home economics classes take place in the Wernicks' kitchen and at the sewing machine upstairs.

Physical education takes place outdoors. Students hike and raft. In the winter, they ski or snowboard at Whitefish Mountain Resort every Monday.

Every fall and winter, students camp for a few days in Glacier National Park. They backpack in, set up camp and learn how to cook for themselves. In the winter, they make snow caves to stay warm.

Science classes are perhaps the most unique. The biology lab is located in a solarium, which holds a small pool and several exotic plants. A fig tree, olive tree and lemon tree are thriving in the solarium, as are several tomato plants and pots of brightly colored geraniums.

There are several more plants in the nearby greenhouse. Apples, cherries, peaches, apricots, raspberries, green beans, tomatoes and chives grow there. Grapes will ripen on the vine in October.

The students help the Wernicks tend the plants and harvest the fruit. Two years ago, they planted a plum tree. Each spring, they pollinate the apricot trees with paintbrushes because there aren't enough bees in the North Fork to do the work.

Working in the greenhouse is part of the school's work-study program. Jerry Wernick assigns the chores at breakfast, and each student works for two or three hours in the afternoon.

In the fall, chores include picking fruit and digging potatoes in the garden. Someone has to stain and weatherproof the wooden fence around the garden, and there's a lot of work to do on the bunkhouse before the snow arrives.

The old bunkhouse burned down in February. No one was injured, but it left the boys without a place to sleep. Three moved into a loft in the solarium; two stay in the Wernick's basement rec room.

Losing the bunkhouse has turned into a positive experience, Wernick said. The students often help him with construction projects; kids helped build nearly every building on the property.

"It gives them a good opportunity to see how a building actually goes up," he said.

Girls and boys alike help with all the chores, including construction. But girls do tend to get more of the cooking and cleaning-related jobs, Horn said.

The Wernicks want to differentiate between the sexes, Linda Wernick explained. Girls take a full year of home economics, while the boys take a "survivor" course. Girls wear skirts except during recreation and work times.

"We're promoting a parting of ways of gender," she said.

But the main message at Tamarack Springs is self-sufficiency. The Wernicks want their students to learn discipline and give them skills to follow whatever path they choose after high school.

"We want to help all these kids believe in themselves," Jerry Wernick said. "If they want to own their own business or build their own home, we're giving them the skills."

Reporter Kristi Albertson may be reached at 758-4438 or by e-mail at kalbertson@dailyinterlake.com.