Every enrichment director in this room has watched it happen — kids who can't sit with boredom, can't tolerate discomfort, can't put the phone down. The research is finally catching up to what we've known for years. At Park School, we stopped waiting for a solution and built one: we brought in Fire & Knives, a structured outdoor skills program centered on fire safety, knife handling, and real competence-building. No screens. No passive learning. Just kids doing hard things and discovering they're capable of them.
This SPARCburst is part cultural diagnosis, part field report — what we saw in our students, what parents said, and what we'd tell any enrichment director thinking about doing the same.
