Spending the summer with horses and math

Walker, Iowa -- Equestrian lessons and geometry homework are filling the summer for students at Cono Christian School.

As a small day and boarding school north of Walker, Cono offers a two-semester academic school year and closed the year with 55 boarding students. But this year the school added its first eight-week summer session. Five high school girls are attending.

The girls begin each morning with an hour of math lessons at 8 a.m. Then come equestrian lessons from 9 till noon. After lunch, more math tutoring is followed by a few hours of free time. In the evening the girls rehearse for the play, “Anne of Green Gables,” which they’ll perform later in July.

“Grooming the horses is my favorite thing. I take care of Merritt, and she is adorable,” said student Hannah, 17, of Washington, where she took care of horses at a horse farm in order to receive lessons. Masha, 18, of Pennsylvania, who has attended Cono for two years, loves going to the horse barn.

“They’re pretty much my life,” she said of the horses. “I can get along with them better than people.”

“The horses are a big ‘carrot’ for Masha,” said Lynn Jahl, dorm mother for the summer boarders. “Getting homework done means she can go to the barn for a while. Sometimes, during the school year, Masha will come here with me at 5:30 a.m.”

Jahl said she sees Cono moving to a year-round plan. “Sometimes they just need to get away from home faster,” she said. The school’s headmaster is Thomas Jahl, Lynn’s husband. He believes that activities like equestrian lessons are important for improving student behavior. Books are important, he said, but some kids need to get to do things, too.

“Most of these kids believe that adults don’t do what adults are supposed to do,” he said. “When they see people doing the right thing, they think, ‘Oh, hey, I can do it too!’”

To date, Cono students have gone swimming, seen a play in Waterloo and shopped in Cedar Rapids.

Lynn Jahl said that the girls also love going grocery shopping with her. Tom Jahl explained that Cono wants to educate youngsters within a structure of work and worship.

He sees Cono as a rescue mission modeled after the parable of the Good Samaritan in the Bible. Tom Jahl believes that as a Christian he should be pursuing helping people whole-heartedly. He wants the staff to give away everything they’ve got in order to serve children at Cono.

The girls pay $4,000 for the eight-week program, which includes room, board and instruction. They’ll go home for two weeks in August before most return for the fall semester.

Natalee, 16, of Iowa, said she’s looking forward to that time at home, too.

“The horses aren’t terrible,” she said. “But I waited for summer all year long, and then I found I was coming to boarding school.”

But while Kooker isn’t excited about the horses, she has loved the kittens that live in the horse barn’s haystacks.

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The author, a graduate of Cono Christian School, is a sophomore at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Ga. She is studied at the World Journalism Institute in New York City in May/June 2010.