On a leased twenty-six-acre parcel of mixed hardwood and pine on Bee Tree Road, eight miles east of downtown Asheville, North Carolina, a small organization called Coppice Forest School holds class four mornings a week, in nearly all weather.
The school has fifteen children this year, between four and nine years old. They meet from 8:45 to 12:45, Monday through Thursday, September through May. There is no school on Fridays. There is no school in the rain only if there is also lightning.
The school's founder and one of two full-time teachers is a woman named Petra Goff. She is thirty-six. She trained as an early-childhood educator at Warren Wilson College and spent six years teaching prekindergarten in a Buncombe County public elementary before she started Coppice in 2021.
Her co-teacher is a man named Devon Cofer, thirty-two, who came to Coppice in 2023 from a Quaker school in Greensboro.
On a Wednesday morning in early May, the children arrive at the trailhead pull-off on Bee Tree Road at 8:45. Parents drop them off from a line of cars on the shoulder. There are no buildings. There is a gravel turnaround, a chained gate, and a path into the woods.
The children carry their own packs. Each pack contains a water bottle, a sit-pad, a small lunch, a rain layer, and, for the older children, a small whittling knife in a sheath.
The whittling knives are, Goff says, the thing that most often makes parents nervous on the tour and the thing that, after a year, parents most often comment on. The school has had two cuts in five years, both small, both treated with a Band-Aid from the small first-aid kit Goff carries.
The morning begins with what Goff calls the gathering. The children sit in a rough circle around an old hemlock stump about a quarter-mile up the trail. Each child says good morning to the group and to the woods.
The greeting to the woods is something Goff borrowed from a forest-school program she visited in Norway in 2019. She did not invent it. She also does not require it. About half the children, on any given morning, choose to say it. The others sit quietly.
After the gathering, the children have what is called free play until 10:00. Free play means they may do anything within the bounds of the site, alone or in groups, as long as they remain within earshot of a teacher.
On this Wednesday, three children are building a small dam in a creek that runs along the eastern edge of the property. Four are tracking, with great seriousness, a deer trail that ends inconclusively at a small clearing. Two are climbing a low oak. One, a five-year-old named Hazel, is sitting alone on her sit-pad looking at a beetle.
Goff and Cofer move between the groups. They observe. They occasionally offer a question. They almost never offer an answer.
At 10:00 the children gather again for what Coppice calls skills time. This is the one structured block of the morning. It runs about thirty-five minutes. The topic varies week to week.
Today's skill is shelter building. Cofer has brought a length of tarp and a length of paracord. He demonstrates, with two seven-year-olds, how to tie a clove hitch around a tree, how to stake out the corners, how to make a ridgeline.
Then the children break into small groups and build their own shelters. There is, predictably, an argument about whose tree is whose. Goff intervenes minimally. By 10:45 there are four small shelters, two of them collapsing, one quite good.
Snack is at 10:45. The children sit, mostly, in their shelters and eat.
After snack the children have a long second free-play block until lunch at noon. The dam in the creek is, by 11:30, three feet long and substantial.
Lunch is eaten together. The teachers eat with the children. There is no requirement to eat what is in the lunch box, and no requirement to finish anything.
After lunch the children gather again for the closing circle. Each child shares one thing from the morning. The five-year-old who watched the beetle reports that the beetle had six legs and walked very slowly. She is, Goff notes later, learning to count.
At 12:45 the children walk back to the trailhead. Parents are waiting.
Coppice is one of about eleven forest schools and nature-based programs in western North Carolina. It is licensed as a small private school by the state. Tuition is $9,400 for the year. About a quarter of families receive partial scholarships funded by an annual benefit dinner.
Goff is careful, in conversations with prospective parents, not to claim that the model is better than traditional school. She says it is different, and that for some children at some ages it fits well, and for others it does not.
What the morning offers, she says, is mostly time. Time to look. Time to try a thing. Time to be bored. Time to fail at building a dam and then build it again.
By 1:00 the children are gone, the path is quiet, and Goff and Cofer are walking the site one last time, picking up a forgotten water bottle and the tarp.
