By his own account, Ken Cadow was a reluctant student.

His father had been a teacher, but went to work at IBM to earn enough to raise a family. Cadow grew up mostly in Rhode Island.

“I learned a lot of stuff with my dad in the shop,” Cadow said in a recent interview. “He was always kind of a science teacher. ... We spent a lot of time in the woods.”

So it’s no surprise that some of the things that excite him most at Oxbow High School, where he is co-principal, involve hands-on work. At the school’s recent Celebration of Learning, Cadow spent a fair amount of time in the school’s new STREAM lab. Paid for with federal COVID-19 relief funds, the room is stuffed with laser cutters, 3-D printers and other machines that allow students to apply what they’re learning in the classroom to something physical.

The public has grown familiar with STEM, which stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and even STEAM, which adds the arts. STREAM, Cadow said, includes reading and writing, which means all of the core subjects can be applied.

A floor above, Cadow dropped in on ninth grade science teacher Nick Ditcheos, who has installed a stream table in a former storage room. The table demonstrates how the flow of water shapes the surrounding land, an appropriate learning tool for a school named after a feature of the Connecticut River.

Lean, bespectacled, earnest, Cadow, who just turned 60, is in his element here. Though Oxbow looks like a lot of New England regional high schools, down to its cinderblock construction and drop ceilings, it seems deeply engaged in the moment-to-moment struggle to reach every student, particularly those who don’t thrive on the traditional diet of classroom discussion and homework. The school’s first Celebration of Learning, a six-hour open house in mid-April, was another effort to knit the school and its community together.

Though he didn’t set out to, Cadow has written a book on the subject. His acclaimed young adult novel, “Gather,” which follows a high school student who spends a lot of time in the woods, but without the advantages Cadow had growing up, models much of what Cadow talks about at school.

“That book, in my opinion, accurately articulates and demonstrates what happens in high schools” in the area, Heidi Wright, Oxbow’s athletic and activities director, said at the Celebration of Learning.

“I think the school dynamic in the book is right on,” said Ben Arendsee, who teaches Cadow’s book in a couple of his English classes at Oxbow, which serves around 360 students in grades seven to 12 for the towns of Bradford and Newbury.

Books travel in a way schools can’t. Thanks to “Gather,” which was shortlisted for the National Book Award for young people’s literature, Cadow’s ideas about what a public school should try to do for its students is getting a wider airing. Next month, after the end of the school year, Cadow will travel to San Diego to give a talk about “Gather” at the annual conference of the American Library Association. “Gather” was one of four books to receive the ALA’s Michael L. Printz Honor for Excellence in Young Adult Literature.

Because it’s through the ALA, the award brings the book to the attention of public and school librarians around the country, Cadow noted in an interview. “In terms of the school system, it’s probably more important than the National Book Award.”

Connecting the classroom to the world

Before Cadow and his young family moved to Norwich in 1997, he’d kind of bounced around. He’d studied English and computer science at Rhode Island College, thinking he’d become a technical writer, and served in the Navy for four years. For a while, he operated a general store on Block Island, where he’d spent summers as a child.

In the Navy and at the store he had his first experiences as an educator. He spent a lot of his time in the Navy at sea, and he discovered new, 18-year-old sailors had little acquaintance with financial management. So he taught them.

“I started doing that for everybody who came shipboard,” Cadow said.

Running the store, at one point, 12 of a class of 13 graduates of the island’s small high school had worked for Cadow. One of the things he liked best was “connecting and explaining what we were doing,” he said.

Teenagers played a part in a formative experience during his first years in Vermont. He had long been a visitor to the state, and had family living here when he and his wife, Lisa, and their first two children moved to the Upper Valley.

After the move, he did something that’s become increasingly uncommon among new arrivals: he listened.

This took a tangible form. While studying for a master’s degree at Dartmouth College, Cadow interviewed deer hunters for an oral history project, including spending some time at deer camp.

“What really struck me was how engaged these usually reticent teenage boys were,” Cadow said. “They were really leaning into the whole experience of hunting,” including the history of it.

He also captured an ongoing dynamic: Wealthy new landowners buying up big parcels and posting them against hunting.

That scenario planted the seed for “Gather.” Cadow envisioned a Vermont boy falling in love with the daughter of a family that had moved to town and posted the boy’s cherished hunting ground.

He kicked that idea around for quite a while, and in the meantime took a job as a long-term substitute teacher at Thetford Academy, an independent school that serves as the public high school for Thetford.

“I just loved it,” Cadow said.

At 38, he had found his calling, among young people at the cusp of adulthood. He stayed at Thetford for decade, becoming a full-time teacher, then worked as a kind of roving administrator at Randolph Union High School, where he oversaw applied learning, workforce development and flexible pathways.

“I love the intersection of academics and applicability,” Cadow said.

He and Ashley Youngheim are in their second year as co-principals at Oxbow, with Cadow overseeing grades 10-12 and Youngheim grades 7-9.

High school students are at the point where they’ve figured out some things about how the world works and want to know how their education is going to apply, Cadow said. “They’re wondering how they might contribute meaningfully,” he said.

At that age, Cadow said, he had no idea what he wanted to study or to do with his life. High schools have become an exercise in helping students find ways to connect the classroom to the world.

‘Data misses the humanity’

Ian Henry, the 16-year-old narrator and protagonist of “Gather,” is a student in need of connection. Though the book is told from his perspective, it’s as much about where he finds community as it is about his personal struggles with poverty and dislocation.

Ian grew out of an image that unlocked the story for Cadow after he tried to wrestle it into an essay.

“I saw this kid running down this dirt road in the rain and just followed him,” he said. He got 300 words down on the page and didn’t look back. “I knew that this was the person for the plot,” he said.

Ian is cut from the same hard-wearing, frayed cloth as the deer hunters Cadow recorded 25 years ago. He has some aptitude for school, but the environment leaves him cold. His Gramps first showed him how to solder electrical components at age 9. His fondest memories center on the land around the home he shares with his mother, land that his family used to own and farm before they were forced to sell most of it off in hard times.

Times are still hard for the Henry family. Ian’s dad moved out years before and started a new family in Tennessee. And his mom was injured on the job at a nursing home and got hooked on pain meds. The social safety net seems nonexistent.

The saving grace for Ian is that he tries, and that several people around him — neighbors, a local lumber mill owner, a teacher and, later, the teacher’s spouse — help him out. While there are barriers between people, particularly in the form of the “Posted” signs put up by his girlfriend’s parents, and the economic gulf between Ian and his increasingly affluent town, a sense of community prevails.

But as much as Ian tries to dig himself and his family out of the hole, and to realize his dream of farming the land as his family used to, it’s too much for him to manage.

“You always think you’re flush with cash until you find out how much it really costs to live,” he says to himself.

That so many people come to Ian’s aid might not be the norm in real life. “Gather” is more aspirational. A school is only as strong as its community, Cadow said, a sentiment echoed by Oxbow teachers.

“I would say that it does happen, but that it probably doesn’t happen for every student in the way that we wish it would,” Ben Abendsee, the English teacher, said. Because Ian’s parents aren’t as involved in his life, there’s more room for people to reach out to him, he noted.

Though Cadow’s goal was just to tell a story about a Vermont teen, “Gather” ended up as a kind of corrective, a portrait of a student, his school and his community that gets at the beating heart of what a school is for, and some of the barriers that can keep it from being everything it could be.

“We’re kind of data-drunk right now in education,” Cadow said. Test scores and other objective measures offer only a narrow view of whether a school is succeeding, and for a variety of reasons, communities are often cut off from the schools in their midst. “Data misses the humanity.”

Applied study

William Liberty, a ninth grader at Oxbow, said that the school “has its ups and downs.” Bullying can be a problem, though it’s hard to find an Upper Valley secondary school that’s entirely free of it. But William said he knows that people at Oxbow care about him and his schoolmates. “I do feel it,” he said.

“I’ve put five students through this school,” said Amy Cook, William’s mother. Three were her biological children and William is her second foster child. He “has not been the easiest student, but he’s been generally received with warmth and care,” she said.

“As a high school principal, I’ve seen lots and lots of teachers so invested and pouring their whole hearts into it,” Cadow said. “Within the system, everyone’s doing the best that they can and making it work. But the gears aren’t meshing as well as they could.”

Cadow said he’d like to see even more applied and project-based learning, where students could examine issues of interest to their communities. Housing, food distribution, water and stream management are all problems students could be working on, he said.

Applied study and academics aren’t mutually exclusive, though it would be expensive to try to do both, he said. “Yes, we need to get them to college, but how satisfied are we with our college system right now?” he said.

Education currently absorbs almost all of Cadow’s time, so writing is not on his agenda. “For me to write effectively, I have to let my guard down,” he said. “I’m not able to find that place at this time.”

An exception is the speech he’ll give in San Diego. While he tries to make an impact at Oxbow, he’d like to see the book make one, too.

“I think that remains to be seen,” he said. “I think it’s pulled the heartstrings in a lot of cases, in a good direction.”

Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.