By Kevin Allen Rappahannock News Staff Writer Parents in

By Kevin Allen

Rappahannock News Staff Writer

Parents in Rappahannock County this fall will have another schooling option for their children when the Belle Meade Farm School opens to students in grades seven through 10.

The school is both a new and continuing institution. For the past three years, the 1914 schoolhouse was the site of Mountain Laurel Montessori Farm School.

Mountain Laurel is moving to Flint Hill to be closer to its mother school in Front Royal, so Belle Meade owners Mike Biniek and Susan Hoffman are starting a new farm school in the same place on their 138-acre organic farm.

"We love having the school, so it was always our intention” to continue it, Hoffman said. Mountain Laurel “gave us a wonderful start,” she added.

Belle Meade will combine a solid academic program of humanities, mathematics, languages, science, art and music with farm activities.

Part of the tuition families pay will come back in farm-fresh food each week. Students will bring home eggs, meat and produce they raise on the farm.

"I think we’ve gotten to a point in our culture where we know that what we eat really mat-' ters,” Hoffman said.

The school will have one full-time and four part-time teachers, she Said.

Head teacher Greg Garrison is coming to Belle Meade from the Mountain Vista Governor’s School in Warrenton. He said he is looking forward to the opportunity to genuinely provide a collaborative learning experience with students and the farm.

"These students are going to have an opportunity to learn hands-on,” Garrison said. "This is a place where that can actually happen. I see this as a model for how our educational experience should be.”

And the children will have fun learning, he said. "The more a student enjoys learning, the more they are going to remember it in the long term.”

Fellow Belle Meade teacher Teresa