School History

In the late 1980's in the mountaintop community of Monteverde, a group of Costa Rican and North American parents recognized a critical and immediate need for an academically sound, bilingual, environmentally-focused school for local children.

To meet this need, the Cloud Forest School was founded in 1991 with 30 students and since then has grown to its current enrollment of over 200 students.  The CFS model has been to add a grade each year until the first class of five students graduated from 11th grade in 2005.  The Centro de Educación Creativa, as it is known locally, is an innovative, private, bilingual, non-sectarian Preschool through 11th grade school serving rural children of Monteverde, Costa Rica.  96% of the students are Costa Rican and 4% foreign.  The school offers creative, experiential instruction to its students with an emphasis on integrating environmental education into all facets of the curriculum. Our mission is to encourage a new generation of ecologically aware, bilingual individuals with the skills and motivation to make environmentally and socially conscious decisions on a local, national, and global scale.  The CEC welcomes students from the community regardless of race, religion, national origin, ethnicity or economic status.

The campus is located on 106 acres of virgin cloud forest, pristine forest and pasture land slated for reforestation. The land surrounding the school is as vital an educational environment as its classroom building. In 1992, the land was leased to the CEC on a buy-back basis by The Nature Conservancy. In June of 2000, the CEC finalized purchase of the land with the help of the Cloud Forest School Foundation, based in the USA. A conservation easement was built into the deed, permanently protecting this area containing virgin cloud forest.

A Brief History of Monteverde

The Monteverde area is composed of a small and interesting, multicultural group of Costa Ricans, foreign residents, and tourists drawn together by a magnificent tropical ecosystem. This community started out with five pioneering Costa Rican farming families who settled in this unbroken forest in the late 1940’s. A decade later, a group of about 50 Quakers form the United States arrived in the area. These Quakers were drawn to Costa Rica because of the country’s recent dissolution of its national army. The Quakers started dairy farming – and continue to run dairy farms ad a cheese factory – and initiated the region’s earliest conservation efforts by eternally protecting the headwaters of the river which runs through the community. The 1,300 acres protected by the Quakers is now the heart of the 26,000 acre Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, which in turn, is surrounded by the 40,000-acre international children’s rainforest.

In the following years, tropical biologists and other conservationists joined the original families. In 1973, 200 people visited the, now famous, Monteverde Reserve. In 2000, over 50,000 tourists came to visit the cloud forest. As a result, our community has many new services and facilities for eco-tourists and scientists. The area has also become popular with Costa Ricans who are seeking greater economic opportunities and stronger educational possibilities for their children.

At the core of the Cloud Forest School is a need to provide the children of the region with the necessary skills to negotiate the delicate balance between responsible economic development and environmental protection. In a local economy that is still somewhat rural, but increasingly dependent on eco-tourism, CFS students regularly interact with visitors from abroad as well as internationally renowned biologists and conservationists who study the regions.