Bright Ideas

 

Whether your program has a waitlist or you’re working to get new families in the door, how to streamline your enrollment process and ensure it’s meeting the needs of ALL families in your community is an important consideration for every program. 

 

Natural Start invited Sarah Heller, co-founder and former director of Fiddleheads Forest School, to share the process she developed at Fiddleheads to enroll families with equity in mind. Sarah has spent the last two years learning about enrollment practices and asking questions with the goal of learning how to build more equitable systems and reduce barriers to accessing nature-based education. She will describe her process for designing and implementing a weighted lottery system for enrolling families in Fiddleheads Forest School. She by no-means has all the answers, just some ideas and big questions to begin unpacking the ways bias and barriers show up in how we select and enroll families. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sarah is the co-founder and former director of Fiddleheads Forest School, an entirely outdoor, nature-based preschool located in Seattle. She strongly believes cultivating a relationship with nature is essential to a healthy childhood and has lasting social, emotional and developmental benefits. Sarah recently launched Pathfinder Outdoor Learning to support teachers and administrators in cultivating rich, high quality nature-based learning. She holds a Master's in Education and a Certificate in Early Childhood Leadership from the University of Washington, and has been working outside with kids and families for over 15 years. Sarah developed a deep love of the natural world growing up alongside the forests and beaches of the Pacific Northwest. Today she loves exploring those same forests and beaches with her children, and escaping for trail runs and mountain adventures whenever she can.