Atiya Wells is opening Baltimore's newest all-outdoor preschool program on a once-vacant 10-acre lot in Northeast Baltimore, a place where kids will spend their entire school day outside rather than stepping into a traditional classroom. The site, known as BLISS Meadows, already features a pond, an orchard, farm animals and 30 bee colonies, and Wells built the whole thing after watching her own children fall in love with the natural world.
Wells said she and her children found answers to their outdoor questions together, according to The Baltimore Banner. That curiosity became the seed for BLISS Meadows, which Wells' organization, Backyard Basecamp, assembled by combining three contiguous properties totaling 10 acres — a 7-acre abandoned city park, a 2.5-acre farmland parcel with two freshwater ponds, and a half-acre lot with a historic farmhouse, according to Backyard Basecamp. Wells has raised over $1 million to develop the property, per the Banner's reporting.
From Nature Camps to a Full Preschool
Wells started nature summer camps at the site in 2021, and the program has grown steadily since. Lejae Woolcock paid $1,900 for a six-week camp for her children, ages 5 and 11, and told the Banner she will always champion BLISS Meadows. Campers there have examined rocks with magnifying glasses and identified mulberries and daddy longlegs spiders, the paper reports, while nature summer camps elsewhere in the program have included washing and processing a sheep's wool and beekeeping.
Now Wells is expanding that model into a licensed pre-K program, with bilingual teacher Judi Lazo, whose parents are from El Salvador, set to teach the class. BLISS Meadows will also keep offering fresh produce collection and community strolling space alongside its summer camps and other community programming, the Banner notes.
Maryland's Push to License Outdoor Preschools
Wells' program is opening into a regulatory landscape that only recently made it possible. In 2022, the Maryland General Assembly passed House Bill 376, authorizing the Maryland State Department of Education to establish an Outdoor Preschool License Pilot Program to evaluate and license fully outdoor early learning programs, according to legislative records. The Maryland State Department of Education officially opened applications for the pilot program on May 19, 2025, requiring applicants to operate entirely outdoors year-round and maintain specialized staff training.
That licensing step matters beyond paperwork. According to 2022 legislative testimony from The Nature Conservancy, families relying on Maryland state child care vouchers were previously excluded from outdoor preschools because non-licensed, fully outdoor programs were legally barred from accepting state tuition subsidies. Licensed nature pre-k programs require teachers to take additional wilderness first aid and nature-based education courses, and licensed nature pre-k teachers need more training and expertise because of the risk of children getting hurt or lost outside, per the Banner's reporting.
Smaller Classrooms, Strict Weather Rules
The regulatory model looks different from a typical daycare. A typical preschool classroom caps enrollment at 20 children with two teachers, but licensed nature pre-k classrooms cap enrollment at just 12 children, according to the Banner. Fully outdoor preschools must also close when temperatures drop to 30 degrees Fahrenheit, a threshold Wells will have to plan around as she builds an insulated round tent, known as a yurt, and provides all-weather gear for the children in her care.
Monica Wiedel-Lubinski, who has opened three nature-based programs in Maryland, said nature-based pre-k regulations make running these programs difficult and expensive. Still, she told the Banner that Atiya Wells is modeling what outdoor preschool can look like. Reports from the Association for Nature-Based Education in 2025 indicated that prospective outdoor preschool operators in Maryland face significant regulatory friction, since local building, zoning and fire safety codes remain designed for physical buildings rather than open-air environments, according to the Association for Nature-Based Education. The association has launched a statewide effort to license outdoor programs across Maryland.
An Equity Gap Wells Is Trying to Close
Nationally, nature preschools remain more available to middle- and higher-income families, and nature-based preschool participation is lower among children of color and children from low-income families, the Banner reports. Nature preschools have less than 5% Black children nationally. Wells plans to offer a pay-what-you-can tuition scale focused on children of color, even as full-time care at BLISS Meadows will otherwise run between $800 and $1,600 per month. Families can use government scholarships to help pay for regulated nature-based preschools, which is part of why Maryland's licensing pilot matters for access.
Before founding Backyard Basecamp, Wells worked as a pediatric nurse and led a local chapter of Free Forest School in Baltimore, organizing outdoor reading and nature play gatherings for young children in public parks, according to the Chesapeake Bay Program. Baltimore Office of Sustainability data reported by the Chesapeake Bay Program in 2023 found that the number of Black-led urban farms in Baltimore tripled over the preceding decade, contributing to a network of more than 20 urban farms and 100 community gardens citywide — a movement BLISS Meadows sits squarely within.
A National Model Taking Shape
Maryland is not alone in this shift. Washington State completed a four-year outdoor preschool licensing pilot from 2017 to 2021, during which state child agency data confirmed that fully outdoor pre-K programs maintained child safety while ensuring kindergarten readiness, leading to permanent licensure in 2021, according to the Natural Start Alliance. A 2024 report from the same organization noted that states including Washington, Oregon, Colorado and Maryland have moved to license outdoor nature-based preschools to address broader childcare shortages and expand access to state scholarship funds.
The growth has been rapid. Exclusively outdoor programs now number about 240 nationally, per Natural Start Alliance estimates cited by the Banner, up from an estimated 800 nature-based education programs overall in 2022 — a figure that more than tripled between 2017 and 2022. Studies have associated outdoor time with better cognitive development and less hyperactive and unfocused behavior in children, according to the Banner's reporting.
For now, BLISS Meadows is preparing to welcome its first pre-K class to a landscape that used to be a vacant city lot. Wells' effort joins similar experiments elsewhere, including Denver's outdoor preschool rollout and Seattle Parks and Recreation's outdoor classroom initiative, both of which point to a widening national appetite for keeping young children outside, rain, shine or snow.
