Cascades Academy will begin its school year Monday on a new 21-acre campus adjacent to Tumalo State Park and the Deschutes River.

The private, pre-K-through-12 school emphasizes outdoor and experiential learning, requiring all students to participate in a service learning experience. The $10 million campus was designed by Portland-based Hennebery Eddy Architects and was funded with $6.2 million in private donations. Samantha Richardson, who has grandchildren enrolled at Cascades Academy, gave $1.5 million, while James and Kelly Young, also Cascades Academy grandparents, gave a matching gift of $2 million from their eponymous foundation.

The school took on the remainder of the cost as debt, but administrators say the debt payments are equal to the school’s previous rent.

“When we had just began in 2003, we moved into a kind of storefront on Studio Road just behind the big post office,” said Head of School Blair Jenkins. “The school was around 61 students when we started, and we’ll open with around 170 this year. This new location will be a big improvement, and it’s being built for 225, so there will be room for growth, too.”

Ground was broken on the campus in May 2012. The school will have a library, athletic center and science labs, features that were absent at the school’s former site. Jenkins said the new athletic facility will allow the school to field basketball and volleyball teams. Previously, the school only had track and cross country. The site’s location above the Deschutes, however, is cited as one of the biggest improvements.

“This building helps support who we’ve always been, but it’s all right here; we don’t have to go in a big bus to get to the woods to be among nature anymore,” Jenkins said. “There’s a canyon and we’ll build an outdoor classroom sitting over it. You could have a poetry class among the trees and rocks.”

Other features that aim to weave learning into the surroundings include:

• Balconies on both wings of the school building that offer views to students and faculty.

• A large courtyard that can host the entire student body outside.

• Beginning last spring, students began making their own additions to the site by building a biking and walking trail around the campus.

Field trips away from school have always played a major part in the Cascades Academy experience — weekly ski trips to Mt. Bachelor are a tradition in the colder months — and that won’t change at the new campus.

“Part of our mission is to use the surroundings of Bend, like going climbing at Smith Rock, and we’ll still be doing all of those things despite having so much at the new campus,” Jenkins said.

In line with the school’s mission, the facilities are designed to have a minimal impact on the environment, featuring a geothermal heating and cooling system, electric car charging stations and drought-tolerant landscaping.

On Friday, students and parents were offered an orientation to the new building, allowing them to become acquainted with the layout of their new school. As children and parents swarmed the new site, contractors were still tending to the floors and landscaping. While some lights were dark, many details were in place, including a small metal plaque on the edge of the school building near a gully that read “Blair Jenkins Canyon.”

“Coming here is like going from a shack to a four-star hotel,” said Mary Hudson Kelley, who has two children enrolled. “It’s a few more minutes for me to drive here, but there are no stoplights, and I’d rather be driving out here than on some highway. My daughter is almost 16, too, so I may not have to do much driving. But when the winter comes, we’ll have to figure something out.”

Brady Boos, a sophomore who was part of the school’s first kindergarten class, said, “It’s great to have our own place, to have somewhere where I can come home to after I graduate.”

He added that he has some friends who plan to kayak down the Deschutes to school some mornings.

“I think they’ll really do it,” he said.