Sandy Willmore

Ohio Lead Instructor

Sandy joins the CTSN staff with a long background in teaching and education. She started her journey in high school, living in the back room of the science lab.  The teachers eventually gave in and gave her a key to the whole department.  They let her come on a trip to the Bahamas twice where she saw the reef for the first time and swam with a wild dolphin.  After that she was hooked forever on traveling and experiencing the outdoors in its purest and simplest forms. They kicked her out of HS when she made the mistake of graduating so she moved on to The Ohio State University to major in Elementary Education with a desire to teach middle school science.  In the meantime...

she was instructing groups on rope courses, initiatives and volunteering with a counseling agency taking at risk youth camping, hiking and rock climbing.  She started teaching immediately after graduating and ended up marrying another teacher a year later.  They had the two most awesome kids ever born on the planet.  She decided to earn a master's degree in Gifted and Talented Education and developed curriculum enrichment programs for them in science.  Then she discovered Montessori education. She went through two years of training and became a certified Montessori Middle School educator, opened a new middle school, ran and directed the program, teaching all the subjects in a looping 7/8th grade curriculum that allowed her to take the kids back to the land every six weeks for adventure and learning.  In the midst of it all her family journeyed to Oregon for a week with a program called Coyote Trails.  Life as they new it ended that week.  Sandy became obsessed and determine to spread this incredible inspirational educational program to every kid she met.  She went home to Ohio and has been working ever since to get CT Adventure Clubs and programming going there.  Sandy has totally fallen in love with primitive skills and has taken classes from several different schools and people around the country.  Since her son was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome, she has a very strong interest in learning more about working with students with special needs in the outdoors through primitive living skills.  After twenty years of teaching middle school students, she is now the Outdoor Education Supervisor for her school district, working under the mentorship of one of her retired high school science teachers where she is instructing students K-12 on everything from science to sit spots.  In her free time, which doesn't really exist, her favorite things include making fires by friction on really cold nights, practicing wide angle vision from the back of a horse and sleeping under the stars on the mountain in Oregon.