GLEN ARM, Md. — Joey Pasco wouldn't have necessarily described his daughter Aurelia as the "outdoorsy" type before. Then his wife heard about this place, Notchcliff Nature Programs, in Glen Arm.
“We knew it was all outdoors, and we thought - let's give it a try,” he recalled thinking. “And it's gone so well that we've been here for three years.”
WATCH: Expanding access to fully outdoor, nature-based preschools/child care programs
And clearly Aurelia, who climbed a tree while we talk to her dad, has taken to the nature-based schooling as well.
“Rather than having kids cooped up in a school that may or may not even have windows in the classroom, things like that, I think this is - there's something to being in nature and learning, especially at a younger age that you can't get in a building,” Pasco told WMAR-2 News.
And when we say nature-based, we mean it. Barring a severe weather emergency, kids here are outside all day, year-round - rain, sleet, or shine. Monica Wiedel-Lubinski runs Notchcliff Nature Programs. She says outdoor education helps kids become more environmentally-conscious, more independent, and more resilient.
“There's a study that talks about the kids of the 1980s. If you compare how strong they were, their bodies were compared to today's kids, it's very sad. A lot of that has to do with screen time and sedentary ways of thinking and learning,” she said.
Wiedel-Lubinski is also the head of the Association for Nature-based Education. She advocates for this type of schooling all over the country, but here in Maryland, she had to push her efforts into high gear, because the State Department of Education hasn’t recognized it as a valid form of early education. Problem is - plenty of nature-based programs exist throughout the state anyway, operating without a license.
“They fly under the radar. And that's dangerous potentially for children,” Wiedel-Lubinsky said, since such programs aren’t subject to regular inspections and other health and safety regulations by MSDE.
It’s also why programs like Notchcliff can only operate part-time; if they went beyond a certain number of hours per week, they’d be in violation of state law.
And even for the programs that do everything by the book, no license means no state-funded subsidies or scholarships for families. Access to this kind of education becomes limited to those who can afford it.
“It keeps this barrier in place for sort of haves and have-nots,” Wiedel-Lubinski said. “While this may not be the choice every family wants to make, it should be an option for any family that wants to make it.”
That's why she and a team of other nature-based educators lobbied the state legislature to establish a pilot program for outdoor preschool and child care licensing. They were successful; the law went into effect in 2023, and the pilot program starts this fall.
You can read the bill that passed here. If you're an educator that wants to apply or learn more, click here. The deadline is May 30, about 5-10 will be selected. Priority will be given to programs serving a broad range of geographic areas.
The Maryland Department of Education will use the program to investigate the benefits of nature-based education, submitting a final report to the governor in 2027 with recommendations for modifying or expanding it.
However, there's no funding attached to the pilot program. So educators like Wiedel-Lubinski continue to run their schools and daycares on their own. They do it because they believe in it.
“There's decades of research about why this is so, so beneficial to physical, social, emotional wellness and nature connection itself. Ultimately we need young people to be caretakers of our planet.”
