Will Smith Zoo School

The largest nature-based preschool in the country, the Will Smith Zoo School fosters children’s overall wellness, social skills, and intellectual curiosity largely by ensuring they spend half of each day outdoors. Founded in 2004 on property owned by the San Antonio Zoo, the school moved in 2018 to its current facilities: a renovated mid-century building with numerous outdoor learning and play areas set on two hillside acres. The LEED Platinum school reinforces students’ connection to the natural environment while passing its conservation mission on to future generations.

To expand its educational mission, the Zoo developed a new on-site preschool facility and adjacent grounds to accommodate up to 200 students from ages three to five. The design includes the renovation of an existing 20,000-square-foot mid-century building with new classroom environments supporting a nature-based curriculum. Nearly half of the teaching spaces integrated into the surrounding landscape. This outdoor emphasis is based on the idea that students are healthier, learn better, socialize more, and are more empathic when connected to nature.

The redesign abandoned the pre-existing school’s interior double-loaded corridor, expanding the classrooms to the full width of the building. Sending all student circulation outdoors allowed the school to recover two classrooms’ worth of hallways space. 79% of regularly occupied spaces are daylit to enhance performance and well-being while 99% of regularly occupied spaces have quality views of the outdoors.

Blurring the division between indoor and outdoor, the building leverages the environment as another “teacher” by reinforcing students’ connection to the natural environment. The school has a direct connection to the greater teaching environment of the Zoo and helps reinforce the Zoo’s conservation mission for future generations. Zoological exhibits are tightly integrated with the new building and landscape, seamlessly blending play, learning, and adventure.

Embracing Diverse Learning Opportunities

Children learn differently, with broad neurodiversity present in any population of students. The Zoo School supports this diversity of learning with spaces that approach structure, risk, choice, and messy chaos in different ways. For instance, the school’s play and learning spaces have structured areas, like edible gardens, and unstructured areas with loose objects, like downed tree limbs and branches. There are outdoor areas that focus on music and art, and others that support science—overall embracing children’s different learning needs and modalities.