Letter to families from Lia Grippo ~ Wild Roots founder/director

Greetings Families,

​Throughout Wild Roots’ existence, we have been committed to ensuring this model of education is accessible to as broad a population of families as possible.  We believe in and are dedicated to nature connection and rich, quality programming for young children.   In order to achieve those goals, we have tried to keep our rates moderate, while tending a tuition adjustment program to keep Wild Roots within reach of many.  One of the challenges of this has been to compensate our dedicated teaching staff, who must be at once great early childhood educators and great naturalists. While we are able to provide a competitive salary, we ask more of our teachers than other early childhood programs.  It typically takes about 5 years working in the field to become a seasoned teacher.  

​We want to ensure that teachers stay in this field, for which they have so much passion and so many gifts, long enough to become masters of the work and beyond.  In order to make that happen, we must find ways to compensate folks as well as possible. Recognizing that the economic resources within our community vary from family to family, we have developed a tiered tuition model.

Please look at the table provided based on HUD income levels for Santa Barbara County and see where your family is situated.  If your family income falls into the low income categories, we invite you to apply for tuition assistance - contact us for an application. 

If your family income is above moderate, we ask you to consider paying at a higher tier.  We understand annual income is never the only factor in a family’s financial picture, so we leave it up to you to select to pay more if you choose. 

We hope that our school community will continue to grow in dedication to equity and inclusion, working together to take better and better care of one another.  The core of our orientation to nature connection at Wild Roots is and has always essentially been relationships ~ to self, people and place.

With gratitude,
Lia ​