Our Mission

Tending to our children. Preserving the sanctity that is childhood. Creating a space for the future to thrive. 

Site

1111 Hemlock Road

Carson, WA 98610

…in the old Processing Plant of the Wind River Nursery

Doors open

April 1, 2019

Core Hours 7:30AM - 4:30PM

Aftercare Hours 4:30PM-5:30PM

Monday - Friday

Team

Megan Paris
Kaylei Berry

Christina Craig
Kez Comstock
Tiffany Pearsall Marissa Davis

Acceptance

Frontier is a place where children are accepted, not just tolerated.  We work as a community of learners to create a safe space for every child.  This means we understand that children are messy, and we look forward to the messy art, messy feelings, and messy noses.  We embrace the chaos.

We PLAY.

Education

Frontier is a progressive childcare.  We hold true that in order for authentic learning to take place, you need to experience life with head, heart, and hand.  Head meaning knowledge, information, and facts.  Heart meaning love, connection storytelling, and history.  Hands meaning five senses, reality, and physical truth.

We CREATE.

Empowerment

At Frontier, children are given trust, the most powerful tool of all.  We trust children to know their own limits, assess their own risk, and to know themselves better than anyone else ever could.  This trust is made possible through engaging relationships with responsive and reflective caregivers.

Children are taught the elements of respect and caring through the creation of a democratic classroom, in which children themselves are responsible for developing rules, performing real work to care for their space, taught to listen and hear one another, and given the freedom necessary to find their own voices.  Frontier strives to teach children resilience through healthy risks, creativity, and exploration of their environment.

We TRUST.

Nature

Our days at Frontier are designed so that children have maximum agency over their own learning. We find that, in addition to large chunks of time to work on projects, children need at least two hours of outside time per day… Rain or shine! This helps reduce stress, build resiliency, and above all builds a relationship with the physical world. It is through this relationship that children learn best - through direct experience with the world around them and all the challenges that come with it.

Our unique location in the Wind River Business Park allows us to cross the street and be greeted with limitless trails and adventure. Our neighbors are Trout Creek, the USFS Wind River Work Station, and the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. 10 minutes of walking gets us to the Wind River Arboretum, and who knows what else we will find!

Frontier is located at the southernmost border of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in the old historic Wind River Nursery.  Never heard of it?  Neither had we until we stumbled upon a forest service ghost town, complete with miles of trails, a 9 acre arboretum and a training center where every park ranger in the nation was originally trained at the programs inception.  Add to that the giant fields from the original Douglas Fir nursery (that supplied the nations trees for reforestation!) and you have the makings of a magical place where our deep bonds with nature and our local history come alive!  Conservation itself was born here after Gifford Pinchot saw what current logging practices were doing to our forests.  With this in mind, Frontier offers full-time care for 32 children 0-5 years old.