When Espie Chapman began teaching introductory agriculture classes at Kailua Intermediate School three years ago, the plot of land near her classroom was mostly vacant except for a small orchard of fruit trees.

Chapman had no farming experience, but she was determined to create a space where her seventh and eighth grade students could grow fresh fruits and vegetables. She asked the teens what they wanted to plant and got to work purchasing wheelbarrows and seeds for her class.

The school’s garden now produces fruits and vegetables like bok choy, spinach and papaya that Chapman’s students transform into soups and salads to sample during class.

“We just try and look at what’s in our farm, and what kind of recipes can we do with that,” Chapman said. “If they’re going to try and eat it, we’ll make it happen.”

Chapman’s class teaches teens about nutrition and sustainability, but while students are cooking the kind of locally sourced and culturally relevant lunches that the Hawaii Department of Education aspires to provide in all schools, they can’t actually serve meals in the cafeteria.

DOE previously ran a pilot program to train schools on food safety and enable them to serve produce from their gardens, but the program has been on pause since the Covid-19 pandemic. Without it, Chapman would have to figure out how to meet strict federal and state protocols on her own to supply the school’s cafeteria with produce from the garden.

DOE did not respond to questions about the status of the Garden to Cafeteria program and whether schools will be able to participate in the future.

Approximately 85% of Hawaii schools have gardens, but only a few have serious agricultural programs where students earn certifications as food handlers or gain firsthand experience harvesting and selling produce and using sustainable growing methods.

Typically teachers use school gardens for lessons ranging from the life cycle of a plant to a poetry unit focused on nature. But some want to take their lessons a step further by using produce from the gardens in school meals, exposing more kids to fresh fruits and vegetables and giving students a sense of ownership over what they’re eating.

DOE has historically struggled to increase the use of local ingredients in school lunches, and advocates say gardens can encourage students to eat healthier.

“School gardens can galvanize a community,” said Natalie McKinney, chief program officer of the Kokua Hawaii Foundation, which promotes environmental education and runs a learning farm in Haleiwa.

‘A Hidden Gem’

Third grade teacher Rex Dubiel Shanahan planted a garden at Sunset Elementary when she first started teaching in 1987 and takes pride in showing students how to plant seeds or make kimchi using the carrots they grow.

“You can teach almost everything through the garden,” Dubiel Shanahan said.

Sunset Elementary participates in the Aina In Schools program, which is run by the Kokua Hawaii Foundation and provides schools with activities that tie gardening to lessons in science and nutrition. But, Dubiel Shanahan said, she would like more schools to have access to resources on sustainability and healthy eating for students.

In recent years, DOE has offered more professional development opportunities for teachers interested in starting gardens. It has developed resources for schools to create peace gardens to support student mental health and is helping teachers incorporate more lessons about native plants into their classes, said Jennifer Ryan, the department’s school garden coordinator.

Even with more resources and professional development available, it can be daunting for teachers to maintain school gardens on their own, said Waikiki Elementary Principal Ryan Kusuda. Schools don’t have a dedicated source of funding to hire full-time garden coordinators, and many campuses rely on families and teachers when it comes to weeding, harvesting and other tasks.

Waikiki Elementary has the extra budget to pay for a sustainability teacher and a part-time farm manager dedicated to facilitating student learning and keeping up the garden, Kusuda said, adding it would be difficult to maintain the space solely through volunteers.

“It’s a hidden gem,” Kusuda said, adding that the school has roughly 80 fruit trees supplying tangerines and starfruit that students can sample during class.

In some cases, schools use gardens to help jump-start students’ careers.

In Leilehua High School’s career and technical education program, students in the natural resources pathway are responsible for 3.5 acres of land on which they grow lettuce, beets, radishes and more. CTE teacher Jackie Freitas requires her students to earn their certifications in food handling and gain experience selling produce to teachers and families every week.

“We are trying to help our community and provide them with fresh produce that they can afford and that they know is safe,” Freitas said.

Other schools have taught their students the importance of eating local by drawing on their gardens to supply produce to their cafeterias.

Last month, students at the Hawaii Academy of Arts and Science supplied 160 pounds of kalo from their garden to the cafeteria. Cooks at the Big Island charter school turned the taro into poi, which students enjoyed with their lunches of kalua pork and rice, said teacher Wendy Baker.

While the gardens don’t produce enough fruits and vegetables to supply 600 lunches every day, Baker added, occasionally incorporating food from the garden in school lunches helps students appreciate the time and effort that goes into their meals.

“When they help the garden, the garden helps them,” Baker said.

But including produce from the garden in school meals raises the stakes when it comes to requirements around food safety.

Schools already follow best practices around harvesting and preparing produce, such as requiring students to sanitize their hands and thoroughly wash their fruits and vegetables, said Debbie Millikan, a member of the Hawaii Farm to School Network and director of sustainability at Punahou School. But when it comes to growing food for school meals, campuses need to comply with additional state and federal guidelines like testing their water for E. coli every year and tracking the exact location where students harvest produce.

If students get sick from school meals, Millikan said, it’s important for schools to identify the source of the problem and know where their ingredients originate.

“Food safety and garden safety is absolutely critical, no matter whether you’re growing it at home or growing in a school garden,” Millikan said. “The record-keeping part is really critical because you’re serving a large group of students a large amount of food.”

In 2018, DOE started a Garden to Cafeteria pilot program to adopt federal regulations around food safety and apply them to schools. Participating campuses were required to document their compliance with water, soil and food safety requirements in order to incorporate fruits and vegetables from their gardens into meals.

A dozen schools participated in the three-year pilot, but frequent turnover in DOE’s food services branch put the program on pause as schools reopened during the Covid-19 pandemic, said Dennis Chase, program manager at the Hawaii Public Health Institute. Most schools, including past participants in the pilot, haven’t been able to serve food from their gardens since.

McKinney at the Kokua Hawaii Foundation said she’s hopeful DOE will revive the program. Schools are unlikely to grow at the scale they need to produce all their own food, she added, but it’s important to incorporate more local produce in school meals so students will be more receptive to trying new fruits and vegetables in the future.

Other Ways To Meet School Food Needs

Numerous schools on the mainland — and a few in Hawaii — have been able to tackle food safety issues to grow food for their lunch programs, proving that the challenge is not insurmountable.

San Diego launched a program 10 years ago to train teachers and garden coordinators on how to safely plant and harvest food for school lunches, said Janelle Manzano, the district’s farm-to-school program specialist. Before the pandemic, she added, 10 to 15 schools participated in the program, although the number dropped to five last year.

It’s been difficult for some campuses to revive their gardens after the pandemic, Manzano said, but she’s hopeful more schools will start growing their own produce in the coming year.

At Leilehua High School, Freitas was undeterred when DOE’s Garden to Cafeteria pilot ended. Last year, Freitas received a Good Agricultural Practices certification from the United States Department of Agriculture for the school’s hydroponic greenhouse. The greenhouse is subject to audits twice a year to make sure students are following safety requirements for harvesting produce and tracking their cleaning and sanitation schedules.

The certification means Leilehua’s greenhouse is held to the same standards as commercial farms and can supply produce to the cafeteria like any other vendor, Freitas said. While the garden’s safety procedures have not changed much, she added, students are now required to keep a more detailed record of when they clean their tools and harvest produce.

Freitas said her students are still working with cafeteria staff to determine how the produce can fit into the school’s meal plan, but she’s hoping the process will help them understand how they can contribute to food production in Hawaii and take pride in their work.

“It can be done,” Freitas said.

This story was originally published on Honolulu Civil Beat. 

Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy.

“Hawaii Grown” is funded in part by grants from the Stupski Foundation, Ulupono Fund at the Hawaii Community Foundation and the Frost Family Foundation.

Winter is coming…and so is adventure.

The in Islip, New York, is a conservation organization with popular outdoor education offerings that Long Island families rely on for connection and inspiration. The pandemic’s sudden arrival forced a quick reassessment of how to stay connected to the children and families.

Starting with the premise that many families might not have easy access to even ordinary items like binoculars or magnifying glasses, the team created a series of daily nature challenges. Their venture — and the enthusiastic responses it provoked — can create a template for any of us seeking to keep adventure alive even as winter approaches.

For those wishing to create mini field trips to nurture their children’s connection with nature, Seatuck’s Education Director Peter Walsh advises to start small and close at hand.

“It’s really just about exploring and it can be something as simple as, ‘Go watch the sunset. Tonight, try to see it from your yard or window or somewhere safe, and take a picture of it or draw it. Don’t do anything else: just enjoy a sunset.’”

The operating principle in these mini adventures is wonder, he says, and wonder doesn’t require anything except presence. Just be there and notice what’s there to be noticed. Some examples:

• Observe different kinds of birds, then draw a picture of them (adults, too: pick up those colored pencils and give it a go!) or have a conversation while describing the birds in as much detail as each of you can remember: the size of the bird, its colors, the shape of the feathers, beaks and feet.
• If you have any leftover color swatches from the paint store, let the children take them along on their walk and see if they can find those colors in nature.
• Find an anthill and, from a respectful distance, sit back and watch them work. If that doesn’t provoke at least a little wonder, well, pay closer attention.
• Listen to the sound of your sneakers walking over crisp fallen leaves.
• How would you describe the smell of freshly mown grass?

Don’t make the adventure a test (“Let’s see how much you remember, Jenny”), an opportunity for a lecture or a chore. The second it becomes a “have to,” is the moment it quits being an adventure. Children don’t need to be instructed every moment they’re outdoors to “get them to learn.” When they’re outdoors and they’re looking, they’re learning. Maybe synthesize some of that when you get back to the house, but don’t let your drive to pack education into every moment keep them (and you) from actually being in the moment.

Remember that adventures can be had in all kinds of weather. There’s an old joke from the Midwest, where people play hockey, curling, go ice fishing, cross-country skiing and ice caving in the worst weather: “There’s no bad weather, only bad clothes.” So dress your kiddos well and take them out year-round. Kids love holding their wee faces up to the rain, letting snowflakes hit the tongue, splashing in puddles, building snow forts, and sledding or tubing down snowy hills. Do you remember that you used to love that, too?

The Seatuck team’s challenges frequently center around becoming aware of the beauty that surrounds all of us, every day.

“One of the experiments is, ‘It’s going to be clear tonight, so watch the sky at sunset and notice how many different colors you can see in 10 minutes,’” he says. “When we did it, we found five different shades of blue.”

If you’re really observing and not just passing by, nature presents an abundance of beautiful objets d’art. Make a frame from an old box or paper; create an artwork by placing the frame around that incredible rock or shiny bug your preschooler found, then take a picture. Maybe no one had noticed before how gorgeous those beetle’s wings are, but once a child really sees them, they will never forget that iridescence.

Quests fuel many adventures, and the quest can be for something as mundane as “Find five different shades of green,” or “Find three different kinds of bugs,” or “Can we find two different kinds of pinecones today?” “Find five kinds of leaves. Look how different they are from each other.”

If you find an abundance of green leaves, let the kids gather some up and smush them with a mortar and pestle (or DIY equivalent, such as a big rock and a little rock), then add water and let the children paint with the chlorophyll. The paint will have the color and consistency of watercolor, so don’t expect vibrant pigment. But it will be cool.

Add a community element by creating a scavenger hunt that the children design themselves. Leave the things where you and the kids spotted them, then give the list to your neighbors or other family members and see how many they can find. (Then celebrate the win no matter how small. As any Greek hero would tell us, a victory isn’t a victory without some festivity.)

Save your toilet paper rolls and paper towel rolls because those things are adventurer treasure. One alone becomes a telescope, two taped together make binoculars (“The kids will swear it makes everything closer,” Walsh says. “That’s OK. It’s all about getting them to focus on an object and really look at that one specific thing.”). A single paper towel roll becomes a “toot-da-doo!” because who can resist holding one up and toodling triumphantly? Several being “played” at once becomes a cacophony and sometimes, a little cacophony is good for the soul.

When you head out, remember to take a paper bag or backpack to schlep items for the collection — because nine times out of ten, there will be a collection. Practically every kid everywhere will want to collect something — rocks, bug carcasses, sticks, shells, feathers, bark, acorns, pinecones, leaves — and you want to make sure the artifacts end up in the bag and not in your pockets (though, tell the truth: Can you go on a hike or visit the beach without coming back with rocks in your pockets?).

For those with very little children, Walsh and his team recommend the 30-foot hike.

“With the 18-months to 3-year-old group, just let the kids lead the walk,” he says. “They’re in charge of the hike. You make sure they’re safe, but you follow their lead and help them explore the things they’re touching and looking at. You don’t have to go anywhere big or far. Just let them lead.”

British adventurer and author Alastair Humphreys coined the term “microadventure” to describe these small-scale outings. In his book, “Microadventures: Local Discoveries for Great Escapes,” he laid out the elements of a great adventure for children.

“If it involves food, getting wet or muddy, fire or breaking the rules, the kids will love it. … Involve kids in the planning and talk to them when you’re doing it. Point out things that even you take for granted and point out to the children what’s safe and what isn’t. They take in way more than you think. What’s the worst that could happen? Plan accordingly and pack a change of clothes.”

To which Walsh adds, “And a towel!”

Walsh stresses that there is no right or wrong way to create a mini adventure — the point is just to get outside and to feel connected to other people in the world by sharing their experiences and discoveries. The important thing is to interact with the environment, not to just passively sit in it. Especially don’t sit in the environment and scroll on your device. This is mutual discovery, not nature as babysitter.

“We see so much of that,” he says. “It’s this real passive thing of not investigating, not playing with their environment, just walking past it. I think a lot of it is that the younger parents grew up as part of this generation that just didn’t go out and explore outdoor spaces with free, unstructured time. So, when they go somewhere, they don’t really know how to interact with the physical world.

“It’s true with some of the younger teachers as well — the idea of exploring is really foreign to them. We say, ‘Try to find five different kinds of rocks,’ and teachers come back and say, ‘Do you really think we’ll be able to find five different kinds of rocks?’ and then they’re amazed that they found 10.

“We want to keep the idea of these nature challenges really open-ended. If we give them a worksheet or tell them, ‘Try to identify these five kinds of clouds,’ they will spend all their time trying to answer the question correctly and then feel that they weren’t successful if they didn’t find exactly those things.

“So, keep it about wonder and fun,” he says. “If the kids really love it, they’ll want more.”

As long as you stay focused on those two things — wonder and fun — neither you nor the kids will feel inadequate or unprepared. Just by being there, you have everything you need.

Though you might want to bring your toot-da-doo.

At least that’s been the successful recipe for PopUp StoryWalk, an arts and literacy advocacy organization in the Seattle area that for the past four years has gotten thousands of families outside with their kids to read colorful children’s books installed on trails throughout the Puget Sound area.

Elisabeth Lepine discovered the idea of combining storybooks with hiking while on vacation in upstate New York, where she stumbled upon a StoryWalk® trail and saw for herself the possibility of combining literacy with healthy outdoor activity.

“My littlest child was a baby, so I was wearing her,” Lepine says, “but my two-year-old daughter was so excited and ran from panel to panel, running back to lead us to the next display. It was the easiest hike we’d ever done as a family — Juliet never complained about being tired and was so eager to show Daddy what she’d found. When we moved to Washington state, I fell in love with all the beautiful state parks and trails we have and couldn’t believe that StoryWalks® weren’t popular out here. So, I decided to create one.”

The original StoryWalk® Project was created by Anne Ferguson of Montpelier, Vermont, and developed in collaboration with the Vermont Bicycle & Pedestrian Coalition and the Kellogg-Hubbard Library. The name StoryWalk® is a registered trademark and there are now StoryWalk installations all over the country — but they really hadn’t taken hold out West.

When Elisabeth shared her idea for creating a local StoryWalk®, her friends Beth Yost and Jasmin Thankachen were immediately on board.

“It has been a true team effort,” Lepine says. “We all have our own wheelhouse in the project, but we do everything as a team. For example, I may reach out to publishers for one book, and Beth or Jasmin will reach out for another. We all have relationships with various city’s parks and recs officials and can interchangeably respond to permitting requests or arrange site visits, etc. A team effort for sure!”

The initial idea was to create a permanent installation in beautiful Saint Edward state park on the east side of Lake Washington, but park staff told the team it wasn’t a good time for a permanent addition to the park. They could put up a temporary installation if they wanted, however.

That was the Aha! beginning of the PopUp approach, a new twist on the original idea of StoryWalk®. Instead of being limited to one geographic location, the women saw that “temporary” gave them a wider range of options and could greatly expand their project’s reach.

“Looking back, it’s been a blessing because we haven’t been limited to just one locale and have been able to serve a bunch of different communities,” Lepine says. “We’re now able to provide pop-up stories for families to experience free at multiple locations.”

favors books from local authors, which gives the stories a sense of place and also boosts the program’s connection to the Greater Seattle community. The books are displayed page by page on weatherproof storyboards mounted on sturdy metal frames that are placed on easy-to-navigate trails. That way, families can begin reading a storybook together at the start of a trail, read its pages as they wend their way along the path and finish the book at trail’s end.

Now in its eighth season (two series per year), the program has installed a dozen different storybooks in 40 different locations. Pre-pandemic, the sites featured a waterproof field guide for patrons’ comments or recommendations for new books or trails. On one installation, more than 100 families had made entries, which Lepine says gives the team a sense of how many patrons they’ve been reaching—now into the thousands.

Each installation stays up for three weeks, and families can keep track of where they’ll find the next story by checking the organization’s , or . PopUp StoryWalk rotates among book selections so families can enjoy a new outdoor adventure with each installation. The co-founders choose books that have some outdoor experience in the story, along with lessons of kindness, empathy and creativity. The 2021-22 season focuses on diversity. The team works with local brick-and-mortar bookstores and a local toy store to carry the books, which are promoted on the last panel of the hike.

Local artist Keven Atteberry, author of “Bunnies!!!” — one of PopUp StoryWalk’s first selections — designed the playful, irresistible logo. Once the team has decided on a book, Lepine reaches out to publishers for PDFs of the book so she can expand the page size to stand out on the 18-by-24-inch storyboards. Surprisingly, not all publishers jump at the opportunity to promote their authors’ books in this way, but Lepine is committed to presenting the pages in a large format so families can easily spot and read the panels. The books she goes with are the ones the team loves and the ones she can get PDFs for (for which they have to pay the publishers).

And then, it’s time for the team and volunteers to head out to the trails and put the books in place, which is where the auger, mallet and other essentials come in. It’s a good workout: Set-up takes two to four hours, Lepine says, and after three weeks, they all come down and the process starts in a new location.

The Nitty Gritty

PopUp StoryWalk’s fiscal sponsor is the , a local nonprofit promoting citizen participation in the arts. Under their umbrella, PopUp StoryWalk is able to continue as a nonprofit without having to apply for its own 501(c)(3). The team has been able to get small grants through King County’s 4Culture program and has several local sponsors.

Those considering their own PopUp StoryWalk should count on $5,000 start-up costs for the first book, which includes one-time purchases such as the equipment to install the panels, wagons to transport all the materials and the metal storyboard frames. After that, the team budgets about $2,000 per storybook, plus $500 or so for vandalism, which occurs with maddening frequency. They constantly monitor the panels or respond to patrons who let them know via social media when a board has been damaged.

Since the program’s inception, they have worked with in Bothell, and have developed strong relationships so they can call and say, “Need Panel 7 of ‘Bea’s Bees’ stat!” and the panel will usually be ready to pick up first thing the next morning. Lepine says relationships like that with local businesses, and with the parks and other facilities where they return regularly, is key to the group’s success.

PopUp StoryWalk’s mission of promoting lifelong learning and an appreciation of the outdoors is one that’s easily embraced by the nature-loving Seattle community, and the team’s consistent practice of delivering the goods keeps those community ties strong.

As word of PopUp StoryWalk has spread, the team has received requests from all over the Puget Sound area. Given that the founders volunteer their time and labor, they can’t meet all those requests but are more than willing to train people how to replicate the project; they’ve created a travel kit to help them get started.

Lepine says the team is happy to talk with others who are interested in starting a PopUp StoryWalk in their community. If someone wants to create a StoryWalk® they need to include the trademark symbol and the official statement found on the on all promotions of the project, which PopUp StoryWalk includes at the bottom of every page of its website and on the first panel of each story.

Lepine, Yost and Thankachen have now installed the first two of their 2021 diversity series but haven’t announced all the locations yet. They like the element of surprise, so patrons never know where they’ll pop up next.

Little Peepers is located at the South Shore Nature Center in East Islip, New York, and is a program of the , an organization devoted to conserving Long Island’s wildlife. It is one of a small but growing number of preschools in the U.S. that make conservation and a science-based outdoor education their programs’ core. The daily activities of its small students, aged 3 to 6, may sound like a field trip every day, but the curriculum is actually a formal education in the most informal of settings: the forest, the beach, the salt flats.

“We teach science, math, music, language — all the standard preschool curriculum — using nature as the guiding theme,” says Walsh, the organization’s education director. “Teaching in an outdoor setting is very fluid, very dynamic. If we want them to study shapes, we’ll go outside and have the kids collect some things. Then we have them look at the items, sort them and talk about ‘Well, what’s different from one over the other?’”

“In a traditional classroom when you do shape sorting, you’re dealing with pre-cut shapes. They’re exact. ‘It’s a star. It’s obviously a star.’ But a leaf? Well, what shape is that? The kids really interact with each other. They debate about it and come to an agreement.”

Not only did the children in that instance learn about shapes, they learned how to discuss the evidence, process the facts and have their minds changed by their and others’ observations. They can then take their collection of leaves and talk about the different textures, colors and patterns they observe.

“Pattern recognition is one of the early reading skills,” Walsh says. “And in this setting, it just flows for them without feeling like they’re sitting down for a big lesson. They may go and make a mud pie, and it might seem like ‘just play,’ but while they’re making those mud pies, they’re learning about mixtures and solutions. They get a stick, the stick breaks and they have to ask, ‘What do I need to have this work? I need a bigger stick. I need to use it this way…’

“They won’t have the terminology for a while, but they will have a direct experience of what, for example, a fulcrum is. Those pathways get set in early childhood and that will serve them throughout their education.”

When it came time to name the preschool program, all the staff had to do was look and listen to the forest around them. Springtime there is heralded by the that sounds like sleigh bells when they all get going. They’re good climbers, Walsh says, who also like to be on the ground hidden in leaf litter.

“They’re small, robust critters that are good climbers and make a loud noise,” Walsh says. “Sound familiar? As we witnessed our young students running through the woods, jumping in puddles, exploring the dirt and climbing trees as they squealed with delight, we immediately made the connection with our native spring frogs.”

Little Peepers’ teacher-pupil ratio is an enviable one teacher to five children, Walsh says, which allows a great deal of personal interaction with each child for the full two and a half child-centered hours of their preschool day. The teachers are trained, certified and are united in their own connection to nature. They also, Walsh says, have a deep bag of tricks to rely on when nature spins the lesson plan in an unanticipated direction.

“You’re planning on having today be leaf day and the kids discover a bunch of salamanders,” he says with a laugh. “Suddenly, it’s salamander day. As a teacher, you have to be really flexible and alright with that — a skill set that’s not always easy to master.”

Classes are held outdoors rain or shine, Walsh says, with the determining factor being the children’s safety. The children are geared up for all kinds of weather, but because the Center is right on the water, high winds can come in with the nor’easters that barrel through the region. The kids predictably will be out in seven-degree winter weather, in snowstorms or in the rain, but when the wind gusts through the forest, branches and flying debris make staying indoors or playing in a protected area advisable.

Risk is always something to consider in outdoor settings and understanding and managing it are major skills the Little Peepers learn. The children are taught how to whittle and start fires. They learn to make tea over a campfire, and they are always, always climbing, Walsh says.

“‘Stop, get down, you’re going to hurt yourself’ are definitely things you will never hear in our program,” he says. “You’ll hear, ‘Are you making a good choice? Are you looking where you are?’ There are definitely rules, and our staff is vigilant, but the children are allowed to learn about risk. You’ll hear a 3-year-old asking a 4-year-old, ‘Is that smart? Do you think that’s a good idea?’ They really talk to each other and help each other assess their actions.”

The children are a robust little cohort. Walsh says the program sees very few sick days and often that’s when a child has an older sibling in elementary school. They’re also an agile bunch. When groups of school children visit the center, program staff have observed that the visiting kids have trouble walking on uneven terrain. Elementary students navigating the trails are slow, unsteady and struggling to maintain their balance. The Little Peepers? Like little mountain goats.

Schools like Little Peepers offer a completely different paradigm from what children’s time outdoors has become in most American schools, where recess is viewed as a way for children to burn off excess energy and playgrounds are often more designed for easy surveillance, avoidance of liability and control of the students. Play is viewed as discretionary and beside the point of education. With forest schools and other outdoor-based programs, play is the education and nature the lead teacher.

In creating Little Peepers, Walsh and fellow staff members at the Seatuck Environmental Association undertook a process initially inspired by journalist Richard Louv, whose 2005 book, “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder” introduced the term “nature-deficit disorder” to describe possible negative consequences to individual health and the social fabric as children move indoors and away from physical contact with the natural world.

“One of the challenges we face in the outdoor education field is how do we connect to the general public,” Walsh says. “We’ve found that a great way is to reach people with young children. So, we got together with a team — one person who was an early childhood educator for 20 years and was the head of a preschool program, one who was head of the Nassau County Childcare Council. Some were informal educators like me, and then we met with people around the country who ran other programs.”

In addition to being outdoor-based the curriculum was designed around the science of brain development. The outdoor experience is the pathway to the child’s ability to self-regulate, juggle multiple tasks, use their judgment, be mentally flexible and empathize with those around them, as well as a dozen other intellectual assets that will shape that young brain for a lifetime.

“Those are all skills you’re not really born with but that you’re expected to go into school ready to handle. What we’ve seen is that our children transition beautifully into a traditional classroom setting. They stay on par with their peers until about third or fourth grade, then that executive function really sets them apart from their peers in a positive way.”

Tiny Trees’ children are not outside on recess, nor are they on a field trip. The school itself — all classes, every day, rain or shine (in Seattle, that can involve significant portions of the former and not so much of the latter) — take place outdoors. The school operates year-round and is the largest outdoor preschool in the U.S. and possibly in the world, according to philanthropy and communications manager Katie Weiss. After three years working with the state as part of the outdoor preschool licensing pilot program, the state Department of Children, Youth and Families has created licensing requirements for outdoor preschools, which means Tiny Trees will be one of the first licensed outdoor preschool programs in the U.S.

“Prior to this,” Weiss says, “the state licensing regulations were a lot about ‘How many outlets do you have and how high up are they and what sorts of faucets do you have?’ Mostly, that isn’t relevant to outdoor schools.”

What licensing means in part is that the idea of outdoor preschool itself is legitimized. It creates a roadmap for new programs so others don’t have to bushwhack through such a bramble of licensing challenges and will have established language for how to handle “bath-rooming and hand-washing, which may have been kind of a mystery,” she says. Best of all, licensing means that low-income families can now access government funding to allow their children to attend the outdoor preschool.

Equity is a big part of Tiny Trees’ mission, she says, and 50% of its students receive free or reduced tuition. “We really want to make sure every child has access to quality, healthy, safe outdoor learning experiences. When we talk about equity and access, we’re not just talking about access to early learning programs. We’re talking about access to the outdoors. We work with families to make sure they have the resources they need and the information they need to know what sort of gear they need. We can provide them with discounted gear or gear swaps with other families so that they have what they need.

“We’re working with program on a project that’s called ‘decolonizing the outdoors,’ specifically focused on creating new programming to provide opportunities to families of color, low-income families, and refugee and immigrant families to engage in quality outdoor learning. There are a lot of systemic barriers, such as neighborhoods with fewer green spaces that are safe and healthy or historical trauma that might not be the same for everyone. So, we are in the community-building phase with that where we’re talking with different community partners, organizations and neighborhoods to find out what people want and what works for them in creating opportunities to spend time outside.”

Tiny Trees’ funding comes from a variety of sources, including a boost in the beginning from Washington State’s No Child Left Inside grant program. Public funding is important, she says, because it allows the school to open access to new families and to have a more sustainable program without the cost normally associated with the high-quality education it provides. About 15 to 25% of the school’s funding comes from philanthropy, including purchase of all that tiny, high-quality rain gear — made of the same material you’ve seen on fishermen in shows like “Deadliest Catch.”

Whether the quarry is Alaska king crabs or earthworms, good gear makes all the difference. To paraphrase the Scandinavian programs where outdoor preschools are commonplace, Weiss says, Tiny Trees’ philosophy is that “there is no bad weather, there is just bad clothing.”

So, they zip up their rain suits, pull up their boots, and a pack of exuberant preschoolers head off to discover their world in all its moods, complexity and seasons.

Even for computers, says , author and internationally recognized leader in the study of children’s learning, unstructured play that gives curiosity free rein creates a stronger, more resilient mechanism for thinking about the world in a creative, generalized way. For children, the ability to go where curiosity leads them creates the capacity to be self-driven, self-motivated learners.

Developing those skills, Gopnik says, is much harder if a child spends all day inside a school room.

“The idea of a childhood that’s mostly spent inside with adults determining what you do is actually very strange from a historical, evolutionary perspective,” Gopnik says. “It’s something of an aberration that we now have the childhoods we do (in the U.S.).

“If you look anthropologically at kids in other cultures, most of the time from when they are very little, children are interacting with animals and exploring — importantly, going out and exploring on their own. Exploring the forest or the natural world around them, sometimes with groups of other children, without a lot of adult hovering and supervision.”

Throughout most of human history and in most of the world, that paradigm of children playing outdoors as a part of childhood has been so integral as to be transparent. Not so in the U.S., where, according to the , the average American child spends four to seven minutes a day in unstructured play outdoors and more than seven hours a day in front of a screen.

If we were a forager culture, or even a society in which outdoor life were integrated into adult experience, such knowledge and natural connection would happen as a matter of course. That is not the case in the world most of us inhabit.

“We have to have public support for programs like this if that kind of learning is going to happen,” Gopnik says. “We can’t just rely on the fact that this natural infrastructure is available anymore. We need institutions that can come in and help.”

Washington State Makes A Commitment to Get Kids Outside — Serves as Model for Others

The Washington State Legislature has embraced that mission. Inspired in part by journalist Richard Louv’s 2005 book, “Last Child in the Woods,” Washington’s legislature created the No Child Left Inside grant program to provide the state’s young people quality opportunities to be outside in the natural world. Focusing on under-served populations, the program is designed to empower local communities to create outdoor programming. The Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission has now received funding to the tune of $1.5 million every biennium for the program.

“The ‘nature deficit disorder’ described in “Last Child in the Woods” underscored this fear that we are losing a generation to online activities instead of experience in the outdoors,” says Jon Snyder, senior policy advisor on Outdoor Recreation and Economic Development for Washington Governor Jay Inslee.

“Two things are putting roadblocks in front of kids these days. One is the all-encompassing online environment that is so powerful and alluring — and even vital in some ways — that it’s incredibly engaging and enveloping for children. On top of that, we’re paving over impervious surfaces and developing our natural places at a pretty fast clip, so a lot of folks felt that access and the ability of kids to have these experiences was in jeopardy.”

Because affluent Washingtonians generally have access to the outdoors and the leisure and equipment to enjoy their experience, the Washington State program is particularly focused on underserved populations. This includes low-income communities and urban communities of color, but also very rural communities with immigrant populations, such as programs serving the families of farm workers in the agricultural Yakima area. Grants cover programs for preschoolers, such as the Tiny Trees outdoor preschool, to high schoolers such as the ’s youth leadership program.

Washington wants its children outdoors: The program has proven so successful that the last funding round saw five times as many applications for the program as could be funded, according to Kyle Guzlas, grant services section manager for the Recreation and Conservation Office, which administers the grant program on behalf of the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission.

“This year was the most competitive grant round we’ve seen, with applications from all over the state,” Guzlas says. “We had 173 applications and were only able to provide funding for 30 projects. It’s pretty clear from how competitive it is that there are a lot of great projects not getting funded because we just need more money for the program. So, a coalition of nonprofits and citizens are working toward encouraging the Legislature and the governor’s office to allocate more in the future.”

The benefits for Washington’s children are unmistakable and well-documented, Guzlas says.

“We know from existing data that there are benefits to academic performance, and benefits to the kids’ health and self-esteem. With these experiences in the outdoors, children begin to understand who they are and develop a sense of personal responsibility and an understanding of how they relate socially and within their communities.

“Equally important is that they start to understand about natural resources and concepts of conservation,” he says. Some of the programs are designed to provide pathways that take children from an outdoor preschool environment to outdoor leadership experiences in middle school. By the time they are in high school, some of these young people will be peers who are counseling and mentoring the next generation of kids coming through.

“If they go to college, maybe some will want to study biology or wildlife sciences,” Guzlas says. “The pathway approach is creating the ethics of natural resource conservation throughout the whole structure in terms of understanding nature. You create a comfort level at a very early age that becomes ingrained.”

Most of the organizations that receive funding are collecting data and doing their own analyses of results, which then become part of the feedback loop for the governor’s office and Legislature in looking at future funding.

According to Snyder, Washington state’s program is being used as a model across the country, with states including Minnesota and New Mexico creating similar programs. In Oregon, voters passed the Outdoor School Education Fund mandating an outdoor school program that gives all of the state’s fifth and sixth graders a week-long and approved $24 million for the program’s first two years. More than 30,000 children attended in the program’s first year.

“The next frontier for this [type of programming],” Snyder says, “is understanding outdoor recreation as a health and mental health intervention. The are leading the way in working on exploring the relationship between nature and human health.”

Its role as a mental health intervention may be one of the most valuable benefits to spending time in nature. From the calming effects of Japanese to the confidence-building experience of learning to successfully react to unpredictable events, being in nature helps strengthen the human emotional scaffolding. Yet, according to the , despite evidence to the contrary, increasing parental fears about diseases and dangers of playing outside are a big factor in keeping children cooped up.

“I find this baffling and mysterious,” Gopnik says. “There is so much less danger these days and yet people are so frightened and protective of their children. The crime rate and even the accident rate have gone down and by any standards, children are much safer than they have been in the past.

Terror and fear become a reinforcing process she says. “When you’re terrified, that just makes you more terrified. Telling children everything around them is scary is a good way of making them scared. There’s something of an analogy to the rise in allergies, where if the system doesn’t have a chance to face risks it can deal with itself, then it starts going off even when there’s actually nothing to react to.

“One of the things we know about anxiety is that not being exposed to risk makes you more anxious. The way to cure anxiety is to expose people to the thing they’re frightened of, so if throughout your whole childhood, which is when you should be starting to deal with risk, you never get a chance to effectively deal with it, that seems like a pretty good recipe for anxiety as an adult.”

The antidote can be as simple as a trip to the beach or a park or the forest. The harder part for some of us is to let the children play while we master the fine art of minimal intervention.