Our Story

Over the last 10 years, Jessica and I have worked passionately to provide healthy learning experiences for both our children and the many students we have supported while working in public schools. At some point, both of our careers turned around and flipped upside down after realizing that there must be a better way. We both sacrificed our comfy stable positions with the school district to create the school of our dreams. While exploring alternative education and Permaculture, we (Jessica, Cindy, and myself) randomly signed up for the same educator training program being offered in Portland, Oregon by a forest school called, Mother Earth School. This amazing school was located in a valley surrounded by streams and a forest full of Douglas Firs and Spruces and was located right in the middle of a suburb. The only indoor space it had was a yurt and a lovely outhouse with a composting toilet. We spent the week exploring how we might evolve into educators that could bring the type of beauty and magic this space held for its students back to the Las Vegas Valley. Sure, it was in Oregon with all its lush vegetation and water, but we knew that there must be a way to bring outdoor education to the desert and create experiences for our students to discover the wonders of our environment and all it has to offer.

Our goal has always been to create a school full of freedom, peace, health, joy, and an abundance of resources from both nature and from us as educators, who are actively exploring innovative teaching methods while also observing and appreciating each of our students and how we might support each and every one of them to learn and grow as whole and complete individuals.

Jessica and I teamed up with each other and other like-minded educators Cindy Dixon and Juliana Urtubey to create Regenerative Edge-ucation Collective. R.E.C. is a sub-group supported by the non-profit Great Basin Permaculture. R.E.C. designs and builds systems of dynamic support. Bringing the edge back into education refers to our intention of applying Permaculture design considerations into our educational projects. The Permaculture ethics and principles guide us in our daily endeavors as it is our hope to bring back nutrition, creativity, and fresh air into academic spaces not just for students, but for teachers too.

Our projects have included several outdoor learning experiences and summer camps that focus on gardening education in downtown Las Vegas. We also worked with a local partner, Green Our Planet, to create a new conference style training experience for hundreds of local public school teachers looking to make the most of their school’s garden program by teaching their students outdoors through integrated and S.T.E.A.M learning. Within the last 4 years, we became silent leaders within the garden education movement, which is rapidly growing in our valley thanks to Green Our Planet. We were also able to support the growth of one of our valley’s most developed and engaging garden programs at Crestwood Elementary thanks to one of R.E.C.’s founders, Juliana Urtubey.

Within all of our progress as R.E.C. we were still yearning to design our own nature school program where we had the freedom to be innovative and create opportunities for meaningful relationships and community. Our design for Wild Things Nature School began last summer with our Family Day Explorations. Success came with ease and we knew that we were on to something. Our classes were full throughout our 3 seasons and we put together a camp-out trip for our families at the beginning of this summer.

We are thrilled to offer another year of imaginative nature play with our family exploration days, a completely outdoor preschool/early education program for our learners aged 4-9 at the Springs Preserve, seasonal camp-outs, and additional support for homeschooling parents with our monthly home educator workshops. Our goal this year is to establish an educational co-operative. We are creating flexible enrollment options to meet our families’ diverse needs and provide more challenging experiences for our older learners. We would love for you to join our community. Contact us with any questions you might have or with ideas about how we might support your family’s ability to explore nature within the Las Vegas valley.