My kids attended the PNWK Forest School program from January-June 2026, and had a negative experience.
For context, we moved to the area from out of state in December 2025. Both of my children attended a different outdoor pre-school for the Fall 2025 semester where their experience was overwhelmingly positive. At their prior school, the lead teacher was a former elementary school teacher with over 20 years of classroom experience. At PNWK, the teachers were considerably less experienced. All teachers, including the lead, were fairly recent graduates who, while passionate about nature and children, did not have the depth of expertise nor formal early childhood education training that we were expecting.
The lack of formal training and experience became more evident to us when we learned about behavioral challenges our kids were having at school. While the teachers were kind, they did not seem equipped to deal with problematic behaviors. Similarly, the program as a whole did not seem designed to meet kids where the are, but rather to push "problem children" out through regular calls for early pick ups. Within several weeks of starting the program, we began receiving calls for early pick ups on a regular basis. Keep in mind a "full day" is only 3 hours including the time they are eating their packed lunch, and that they only attended 2 days a week. Obviously this created a lot of stress for our family, and an inability to treat the program as reliable childcare. Unfortunately, that stress also seemed to permeate to our kids who began to say they did not like school, which was heartbreaking to hear. The reports we got seemed to indicate that their behavior at school only worsened over the course of the semester.
When it became more clear that the program was not a good fit for our family, we began asking about withdrawing or phasing out of the program. Unfortunately, the payments are structured such that you cannot withdraw without forfeiting significant amounts of advance tuition. However, we eventually cut our losses and moved on. Truthfully, there was a tremendous mental weight lifted off our family after separating from the program, as it had created a lot of stress for both us and our children. It's disappointing because this seems to the only outdoor preschool program in the area, and my children previously had such positive experiences at their prior school. read more