Growing pains: McCall, Idaho, preschool loses home in state park | Opinion
A small nonprofit preschool in McCall, Idaho, is looking for a new home after being told it can’t continue using Ponderosa State Park as its home base.
Roots Forest School, which focuses on outdoor learning, went from planning a permanent building at the state park to being told that its operating agreement would end next year.
“Families are very disappointed and sad at the news, of course,” Roots director Maura Goldstein told me in a phone interview. “From the broader community, people are pretty surprised and disappointed, and with that, we’ve also gotten a lot of expressions of support, and people are trying to problem-solve this with us and offer ideas and solutions.”
Roots Forest School was founded in Ponderosa State Park in 2015 as a small parent-toddler program of 16 families. It’s now a nonprofit that serves around 70 students a year from Valley and Adams counties and has seven employees, including four full-time and three part-time employees.
Students ages 18 months to 5 years old learn in the outdoors in a forest classroom at the park or on nature hikes.
The school’s eviction is another example of how the growth in Idaho is bringing about changes. Roots needs more room as it grows, and Ponderosa needs more space as Idaho grows. The city of McCall is growing, too. It may be a city of only 4,000 people today, but it’s grown by 1,000 people in the decade since Roots started.
Ideal setting at Ponderosa State Park
Ponderosa State Park has proved to be an ideal setting for Roots.
“It’s been a really wonderful place for us to be and offer so much for the children,” Goldstein said. “And we have a great relationship with the staff of Ponderosa Park, specifically. They have helped us, provided interpretive programming for our students, and they enjoy interacting with our students and seeing us out here every day.”
Roots had been using an old visitors center at the park as its activity center and had been operating the school under a concessions agreement with the state that included a rental fee and a percentage of earnings, totaling about $4,000 per year.
But Roots was told the state needed that old visitors center back.
“As one of Idaho’s most popular state parks, the number of visitors to Ponderosa has grown significantly, requiring additional staff to care for the park and facilities,” according to an emailed statement to me from Robbie Johnson, spokesperson for Idaho Parks and Recreation. “That staff and related operations need the space that was shared with Roots, and Roots had been made aware of that situation.”
A total of 657,921 people used Ponderosa State Park in 2024, a 10% increase from 2023, according to Johnson. That includes about 580,000 day users and about 80,000 campers.
With the loss of use of the old visitors center, Roots had been planning to build a permanent structure for the school in the park, even beginning a fundraising campaign to raise $400,000 for a new building. The school already has raised about $150,000 so far.
But then the state told Roots officials that they couldn’t construct a permanent building in the park.
“Ponderosa State Park cannot provide a permanent building within the park for a private organization’s exclusive use — in large part due to strict requirements under the Land and Water Conservation Fund,” according to the emailed statement. Roots is a private nonprofit.
The state extended its concession agreement to June 15, 2026, to give Roots time to find a new home, but after that, Roots has to be out of the park altogether.
Financial strain for Roots Forest School
Under its previous concession agreement, Roots has paid an average of $4,000 annually, Goldstein told the Star-News of McCall. For the 2025-2026 school year, the cost will increase to approximately $10,000.
On top of that, the school is trying to raise funds for a new building, which will likely cost much more than the $400,000 originally budgeted, because a new site outside the park will require new utilities and infrastructure, according to Goldstein.
If you’re interested in learning more about Roots Forest School, you can go to its website at rootsforestschool.com. The school is participating in Idaho Gives next week, April 28-May 1, and information about that effort is on the website, as well.
“We don’t want to have any break in (our) operations,” Goldstein said. “We’re hoping to be able to start up in fall 2026 in our new home, and ideally, it’ll be somewhere we can stay for a long time.”
