"I was not educated this way," said Norton of Forest Hill, who grew up in an area outside of Philadelphia that had a high density of Friends schools. "I attended a school with 400 kids in my class, and I didn't know 100 of them."
Norton said he liked the idea that every child's voice is heard.
"From the first day of school, every child knows from the start that his or her ideas won't be shut down," Norton said.
Emma Remsberg agreed. During an activity called Clock Work, the kids in her group had to figure out how to walk around stumps on the ground, with only one person touching each one at a time.
"Everyone in our group gave their ideas," said Emma, 12, an eighth-grader. "We realized that if you get rid of one person, that everything might fall apart. By listening to everyone in the group, we figured out that if one person raised a foot as the person in front of them put their foot on the stump, we could do it."
Emma's mother, Virginia Remsberg, recalled her daughter's first year at Genesee. She has grown a lot since then, she said. Emma was reluctant to try the high ropes course, but a friend she met that day encouraged her to do it, and she did, Virginia Remsberg said.
"The idea is that the kids get to know one another," Remsberg said. "Then they support each other and try new things. The new challenges help them grow. "
Despite being new to the school this year, Becky Remsberg, Emma's sister, liked the idea of trying new things. For starters, the first day of school was not just an ordinary day, she said.
"Usually on the first day, you go to school and get a basic orientation of where everything is at," said Becky, 11, of Fallston. "But my first day of school this year was a trip out into the middle of nowhere, where I got to do all these neat activities."
Her favorite activity was called the cocoon, the sixth-grader said. The objective was to climb through a net tunnel, and not touch a person coming through it from the opposite direction.
"It was really a lot of fun," Becky said. "I was able to do it, and that was really neat."
The trip to Genesee built Zoe Russo's confidence, said Laura Russo, her mother.
"Zoe has such a great time whenever she goes to Genesee," Russo said. "Like many of the things she gets to do with Harford Friends, I'm jealous."
Eighth-grader Myleigh Connery has visited Genesee for three years as a Harford Friends student. She has noticed that each year everything gets easier, said Myleigh, who found herself taking the leadership role throughout the day.
