In fact, she has staked her professional reputation on it. Kearns, 60, is superintendent of Newcomb Central School, serving Newcomb, N.Y., (pop. 550) on Route 28N in Adirondack State Park. Her public school is the smallest in New York, with 69 students from prekindergarten through 12th grade. The two-story brick schoolhouse was built for 400 children in 1948, when a titanium and magnetite mine was operating nearby. After the mine closed about a decade ago, the student body dwindled, and the state pressured the town to shut the school.

That forced Kearns to figure out how to make Newcomb Central a special place, a school no one would want to shutter. Realizing she was in the middle of "the biggest classroom in the whole world," she decided to give her curriculum an environmental focus, emphasizing Adirondack ecology and history "smack in our backyard." Walk into the school now, and an eerie silence echoes off the polished corridor floors. Classrooms are empty because many of the kids are off in the woods. The kindergarten class is at the town's little nature center down the road. Groups of students go out with Americorps volunteers three days a week to track animals, learn compass- and map-reading skills and study water usage and pollution. High schoolers pursue research projects: a study of how highway salt affects vegetation or a local lumber company's harvesting practices.

But nothing beats an overnight expedition. Fifth-grader Ryan Gregson spots a herd of deer in a meadow and exclaims, "Wow, I didn't know there were so many deer so close to where I live." And he won't soon forget.