Jared Simons’ heart is pounding. His muscles are tight. His nerves are shot. He kneels over a cinder block fire pit and drops a brown leaf onto a yellow-orange flicker of hope. Crap. The minuscule flame refuses to grow. Jared’s brown eyes search for another leaf. Or pine cone. Or scrap of paper. Something — please anything — to fuel his struggling spark. “He’s panicking,” a hushed voice says knowingly, watching Jared from inside this thicket of Pine Barrens brown and green. Jared, 17, is one of four teen competitors who have survived a manhunt, a wood-splitting challenge, a wilderness scavenger hunt, a knot-tying tournament and a test of strength. Now he’s frantically trying and failing to ignite a one-foot-tall campfire before a rival classmate. He cups a pile of dead leaves in his hands, dumps them on the flame and waits. “He gets too excited too fast,” the hushed voice says as the leaves only dampen Jared’s fledgling fire. Welcome to Wilderness Survival II, the advanced level of a Central Regional High School course so beloved that one senior describes it as “the class that makes you feel excited to go to school.” The elective’s curriculum includes shelter building, compass use, tree identification and a long list of common skills from the not-so-distant past. Three-mile hikes? Brutal, some teens might say. Ticks? The school nurse has plucked a few. But first period just hits differently when you’re cooking pork roll over a red-hot flame. Wilderness Survival is so popular that dozens of students who try to schedule it are turned away. “This class is what living in the ‘80s was like,” says Mark Haug, the towering teacher behind the hushed voice. “We went outside. We played outside. You know, we ran around in the woods.” Haug, 54, a veteran physical education teacher at the Bayville school, knew there might be skepticism when he pitched the course. Wilderness survival? In the standardized testing era? For a generation practically born with phones glued to their hands and earbuds plugging their ears? Instead, what’s happened in the woods behind the high school football stadium has exceeded all expectations. More than 120 kids from Gen Z, long mocked as pillow-soft, are smitten by roughing it with Mother Nature. They’re reading maps. Learning bushcraft. Identifying wild animals and invasive species. “It’s a class that I feel like is something that I could actually use,” says Jared, an energetic junior who loves the outdoors and is obsessed with mixed martial arts. And it comes at a time when schools are pushing to get kids outside through nature walks, gardening and other programs, according to Betsy Ginsburg, executive director of the Garden State Coalition of Schools. “Not only did kids need to get away from their screens, but they also need to learn how to work cooperatively, which they’re doing at Central Regional,” said Ginsburg, whose group represents about 100 school districts. Students in the advanced level course, like Jared, are competing in a weeks-long competition called the HAUG GAMES. It’s akin to a reality TV show with one student eliminated each class period. So here the fit, brown-haired teen is. On his hands and knees. At 8:25 a.m. Leaning over the fire pit and breathing in fresh Ocean County air to blow it out onto a stubborn little flame. He needs it to burn. Jared’s very survival depends on it. A world beyond iPhones It all started with the Boy Scouts. Haug, who has a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies, went on a hike with his son’s troop a few years back. He couldn’t believe how amazed the kids were by … animals and trees? “And I’m like, ‘What?’” he recalls. “‘You haven’t seen this before?’” The experience made him wonder: How can he get his students outside more often? He floated a rough idea to the administration, then wrote a shot-in-the-dark course curriculum one day while sitting on the beach. The maintenance staff suggested a wooded area on the outskirts of the school’s sprawling campus as an ideal space for his experiment. Haug, a tall, dark-haired Central Regional alumnus (Class of ‘88) who wears shorts in 40-degree weather, started teaching the class four years ago. He’s never heard of anything else quite like it. Every other day, students trek down a gravel path, past the tennis courts, around the side of the football field and up a small hill, disappearing into a small patch of the Pine Barrens. Wilderness Survival I students spend considerable time building shelters, stacking sticks to create roofs and digging several feet deep into the white sugar sand beneath the pine trees to create their shelters. Haug’s class feels more like summer camp than school, says senior Elisha Oteng. You never know what’s going to happen out here, raves junior Anna Pitts. “It’s one of my favorite classes I’ve ever taken,” adds Dayton Frulio, another junior who, like Elisha and Anna, now takes Wilderness Survival II. The class pulls students from all corners of the school. Jocks. Band kids. JROTC cadets. Honor roll students. Students Against Destructive Decisions. Most of Haug’s students are boys, but the girls who take the class have been “some of my best,” he says. And these are all lessons students need. “They just don’t have any idea what’s going on outside of their home and their phone,” said Haug, who assigns letter grades to his students based on written tests, class participation and a few assignments. A teacher blending his own skill set with his school’s unique resources is “exactly the type of innovation in education that we need,” says David Hespe, a two-time former New Jersey education commissioner. “This is what high school students want,” he adds. “The ability to do new and interesting things in their life, explore passions that they might want to pursue when they leave high school, and to learn a lot about the world around them and themselves at the same time.” Haug took the course and ran with it, turning it into one of the most popular electives at a school with 1,500 students, according to athletic director John Scran. Several students who completed Wilderness Survival I begged to take the class again. So Wilderness Survival II was born. Haug’s schedule is now jam-packed with four sections of Wilderness I and two sections of Wilderness II. He longer teaches physical education. “We’ll try anything to support kids and engage them,” principal Angello Mazzuca says. Even the HAUG GAMES. Haug’s students watched a few episodes of the reality competition show “Beast Games” this winter when temperatures were too frigid to go outside. Using that as inspiration, Haug created a competition the students are taking so seriously, “you would think it’s the Olympics,” he says. Just ask Jared. “It would really suck to just be out,” he says, “after I’ve been working so hard.” A class that inspires It shouldn’t take long to start a fire. Given a few minutes of prep time, sophomore James Snyder — well-prepared with cotton balls and some old Spanish homework stuffed between his small sticks — ignites a 12-inch flame in about 30 seconds. But Jared and Elisha — Jared’s head-to-head competitor — are still toiling after 10 minutes. “This is actually, like, getting intense,” a classmate murmurs from the crowd. Jared has a well-constructed log cabin-style fire. But he picked logs that are too thick to burn quickly, Haug says. Elisha, a member of the track team, planned on using hand sanitizer, only to learn it is a banned substance too dangerous to use in the HAUG GAMES. Now he’s relying on burning some sticks and a Wawa hoagie wrapper he found on the ground. “It’s a lesson learned,” Haug says quietly. Jared’s flame begins to rise. Elisha scampers a few feet away, grabs a pile of leaves and tosses it into his pit. Students eliminated during previous classes record the showdown on their phones. It looks too close to call. “Let’s go!” a classmate yells as Elisha’s fire finally burns through the string tied over the pit, securing his spot in the final three. Jared snaps a stick in half and hangs his head. A few minutes later, he gets a second chance. Jared quickly vanquishes Anna in a sudden death elimination and staves off banishment from the game. He has conquered the fire challenge. He has survived to compete in the wilderness for another day. His stress, he announces to no one in particular, is already gone. So what’s next, he’s asked, when he’s back inside the school building. “Algebra,” Jared says flatly. The youthful smile fades from his face. Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com. Adam Clark may be reached at aclark@njadvancemedia.com.