Member Spotlight

Cocoplum Nature School, located in Delray Beach, Florida, provides nature-based programs that emphasize unstructured play and children’s innate connection to nature. The Nature School offers a variety of programs including elementary school programs, a caregiver-and-me program for toddlers, a caregiver-and-me program for preschoolers, and holiday and summer camp programs. Because play and nature are central to each program, children spend 60% to 100% of their time outdoors.

Cocoplum Nature School works to cultivate liberated learners who can collectively create a more just and healthier planet for everyone. Natural Start spoke with the organization’s co-founder and executive director, Melanie Stefanovic, to learn more.

What's it like operating a nature school in an urban environment? 

Operating a nature school in an urban space offers many opportunities for place-based learning, which is integral to our programming. The Nature School is in close proximity to various cultural centers, museums, and gardens, so our students enjoy many walking field trips around the city. There are also a variety of other learning experiences that are just a short bus ride away.

The biggest challenge of operating our nature school in an urban environment is offering full nature immersion experiences away from human development. In our experience, many of the local regulations intended to protect children in school settings have created barriers to operating a school in wild natural spaces. So, we established our school in a more traditional facility: the educational wing of a church with 4,000 square feet of outdoor space shaded by the canopy of oak trees. It’s green and lush, but it’s not exactly a sprawling forest.

An additional challenge we face is our inability to ever be fully in the peace and quiet of nature. Even in nearby natural areas and preserves where we take field trips, the din of the highway, the wail of distant sirens, and human litter are ever-present. We meet these challenges by practicing mindfulness and cultivating awareness of our students’ immediate environments so that they might perceive nature as all around them wherever they are.

Tell us about the Nature School's expansion to include elementary grades.

The plan was always to expand through the elementary school grades so that we could grow with our students one grade at a time and provide continuous nature-based education. In our area, there are a handful of wonderful nature-based and child-centric programs for preschoolers and a few nature-based homeschool groups for older children.

However, many parents of these preschool children who wanted to continue with a nature-based education through grade school weren’t interested in or able to homeschool. Additionally, in many traditional schools in Florida, an emphasis on technology and test performance outweighs play, nature, and experiential learning. So, there was a real need for a school like Cocoplum, where children could enjoy the benefits of learning through play, collaboration, hands-on experiences, and nature throughout their elementary years. Now, as a Kindergarten through 3rd-grade nature-based school, we are looking to move to a larger facility next year so that we can continue expanding to 4th grade (and possibly even through middle school)!

Can you share more about your scholarship opportunities and their impact on enrollment?

In order to serve elementary-age students through full-day school programming while meeting local regulations, we had to establish ourselves as either a charter or private school. The charter school route came with requirements and limitations that would have inhibited our nature-based approach. Therefore, we decided to establish Cocoplum as a private school. Of course, the challenge as a private school is that we rely on tuition for operational costs, and the price tag deters many families who might otherwise highly value nature-based learning. To meet this challenge, we accept several Florida state-sponsored scholarships for private schools, known as the Step Up for Students scholarships. For most students, the scholarships account for about half of tuition, and over two-thirds of our students use them. They make a big difference in accessibility and inclusion, and that’s really important to us.

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