Our Activities

The High Frontier provides an extensive student activities and recreation program. These activities include hiking, skiing, fishing, camping, cycling, weightlifting, aerobics and swimming. Our campus also has fields and courts for baseball, indoor and outdoor basketball, volleyball and track. Additionally, volunteer services to the local community are an integral part of the PPC philosophy.

Art

The High Frontier Art Program believes that all individuals have a creative spirit and that creativity can foster learning on many levels. Our program is in part focused on the creative process experienced as a group collaborative. Through group projects, executed in a variety of media, students not only learn how to express themselves as individuals, but learn how that expression relates to others and to the world in which they live.

Working with a group on a specific project affords the opportunity to learn a particular artistic process. Mirroring the masters, professional artists that lead the program emphasize technical excellence and careful craftsmanship. The technical skills learned while working with the group can then be used to create more individual work; art that explores more personal subjects, or perhaps work given to formal investigation of a particular medium or technique. Our focus on the collaborative artistic process leaves time for students to communicate on an individual level and to explore their own creative, imaginative ideas.

By participating in the Art Program, students learn to cooperate with others, think and problem solve in multiple ways, find meaning in their own as well as other’s work, and learn about the role of art in our society and other cultures. Some of the mediums students have the opportunity to explore are ceramic sculpture and tile making, assemblage sculpture and site-specific installation using natural materials, concrete sculpture, painting, drawing and printmaking. The Art Program also engages students on a periodic basis with visiting artists from the community as well as encouraging participation in community arts events in Las Vegas, New Mexico.

Finally, by challenging students to participate in the creative give and take of collaborative art projects, we are integrating the creative process into the PPC model. The spirit of cooperation necessary to reach a common goal serves to strengthen the group, enhance the emergence of a positive peer culture and model behavior with connections to good citizenship, life and work.

The Art program is accredited and integrated into our school curriculum.

Horsemanship

The goals of the Horsemanship Program are to teach the range of skills necessary to be a capable caretaker and rider, to receive school credit for participation in the Program, and to teach responsibility and build self-esteem. As with the Art Program the Horsemanship Program is designed around teaching specific skills and, while not designed to be an equine therapy program, to have tangible therapeutic benefits.

The range of skills taught by our Horsemanship Director includes basic issues of care, saddling, riding and specific activities (4H rodeo events and participation in local ranch round-ups). Therapeutic benefits are derived from learning responsibility through the care of horses and to build self-esteem by learning to care for horses and master the skills of riding.