Windham’s REAL school is expanding to accommodate students from throughout the Greater Portland area and broaden their alternative education program to fit student needs.

The REAL School, an alternative education school for students with behavioral and learning difficulties, signed a lease Thursday for classroom space at the Baxter School for the Deaf on Mackworth Island in Falmouth.

By next fall, this new campus at Baxter School will become home base for the “adventure-based” learning programs that now take place at the school on High Street in South Windham.

Adventure-based learning tailors academic study to team activities. For instance, last fall students and teachers made a weeklong canoeing expedition on the Presumpscot River while studying the ecology and history of the river.

In turn, the Windham campus will change its curriculum to give more “hands-on” and vocational learning modeled around the individual students’ strengths.

The reason for the change, said REAL School Director Pender Kimball, is that some students learn better through one-on-one instruction while others benefit from a team-learning environment.

In the past, the REAL School teachers have had to “double plan” each day’s curriculum to accommodate these different learning styles and give students the option of participating in team activities or more individualized study.

“At the present school, we try to cover the whole spectrum of learning styles,” Kimball said. “By diversifying in this way, we are going to be able to specialize in a different kind of learning at each school.”

With the expansion, the REAL School is hiring more staff and developing a partnership with faculty at the Baxter School.

Kimball said sharing the Baxter campus will allow REAL School teachers to learn sign language and help deaf children with learning disabilities while Baxter teachers will learn new ways to accommodate deaf students of various learning styles.

This is one of the reasons Baxter School agreed to lease their unused classroom space to the REAL School, said Jim Gemmell, director of communications for the Baxter School.

Many children, who are deaf or hard of hearing, need help overcoming learning disabilities. And similar to the REAL School, the Baxter School runs an “experience-learning” program that is a success for the Baxter middle-school students.

“We sought schools that we thought would be good matches for us,” Gemmell said. “The REAL school is community service-oriented and a very innovative program.”

The Windham REAL School now host about 30 students a semester who come to the school from throughout the Greater Portland community.

Because the school is funded through the Windham public school system, towns outside of Windham pay tuition for their students to attend. The school also receives federal grants and the expansion will have no effect on Windham’s taxpaying share of costs at the REAL School, Kimball said.

The focus of the REAL School is to give students, who don’t work well in the traditional learning environment, the chance to achieve academic success and redeem a sense of self-worth.

“In some respects, these kids have grown up feeling like an appendage of society,” Kimball said.

And the idea behind the REAL School, she said, is to make them understand that, despite their learning difficulties, these students are “powerful people who can make a difference in this world.”

A long causeway separates the Baxter School for the Deaf on Mackworth Island from the town of Falmouth. By next fall, Windham’s REAL School will be hosting classes at the Baxter School and hopes to partner with faculty at the state-run school for the hearing impaired.