The school opened in the fall of 2016. Cabell County School Board officials see it as the next step in education. It is a consolidation of Peyton Elementary and Geneva Kent Elementary in the east end of Huntington. The schools were combined to form the incubator school, which is housed in the former Beverly Hills Middle School facility that was remodeled to fit the mold of the Expeditionary Learning model.

Cabell County School officials describe the school as an explorer academy, because of the experimental learning environment. They hope what they learn from their experiment leads to other school districts around the state doing their own experiments and developing Expeditionary Learning environments of their own. Students learn about completing projects that will stretch across different subject areas and can sometimes take the entire school year.

The curriculum for the program is very hands-on and is a real-world way of learning. Students work a lot with community partners, people who are experts in their fields. The students are going out and doing fieldwork, which is much different than a field trip. In Expeditionary Learning, students learn by conducting learning expeditions rather than by sitting in a classroom being taught one subject at a time.