Creative Spirit Learning Center , The Fair Oaks Preschool That Two Childhood Friends Built From Shared Frustration With the System

Since 2016, two women who grew up together in Folsom have been operating a preschool on Fair Oaks Boulevard in Sacramento County in a structure that doesn’t really stand out from the street. The preschool reflects a very unique set of beliefs about children and how they learn. When they ended up working at the same early childhood program years later, Nicole Brann and Aubrey Budelli, who had known each other as children, got back in touch. Their shared dissatisfaction with the way the classrooms around them were being run was what pulled them back together, not just location or happenstance. On their own, they had both reached the same conclusion: too many early childhood settings were set up according to what adults wanted kids to accomplish rather than what kids actually required.

Experienced early care educators frequently face this dissatisfaction. It’s the kind of situation that either drives people to create something new or burns them out. It resulted in Creative Spirit Learning Center, a two-campus preschool and kindergarten foundation program that runs under a philosophy that Nicole and Aubrey, who together bring more than forty years of teaching experience to the work, have been honing since the center began. They refer to themselves as Play Ambassadors. Although the title seems soft and could be misinterpreted as marketing jargon, it reads more like a job description when one considers what actually occurs in their classes.

Two programs are run by the center. The Sunset Preschool is intended for kids between the ages of two and early four who are still adjusting to life outside of their immediate family and are attending their first school. Here, the curriculum prioritizes social-emotional growth, independence, and sensory discovery over academic preparation.

Children ages four to six participate in the Village Kinder Foundations program, which covers kindergarten ready through project-based learning, outdoor exploration, and early literacy and numeracy. Unlike most standard kindergarten prep programs, this program does not rely on the worksheet-driven model. Both follow what is known as an emergent curriculum, which is a framework in which the questions and interests of the students themselves define what is taught instead of a preset syllabus that is imparted from above.

It is more difficult than it seems to ask instructors to be truly flexible and attentive. The warmth of the staff, the excellent physical setting (indoor classrooms and a backyard full of opportunities for sensory play, construction, music, and animal care), and the feeling that the adults in the room truly know each individual child rather than overseeing a group are all frequently mentioned by Yelp reviewers who have enrolled children at Creative Spirit. The final element is the most difficult to produce and the most obvious when it’s missing.

It’s important to note that before enrolling, all potential families must attend an open house or tour. This is not a bureaucratic obstacle, but a purposeful filter. The founders are aware that not every kid or family is a good fit for a play-based, child-led setting. Families that require an academically faster, more structured program at age three are likely to find something more appropriate elsewhere. Through the tour, Creative Spirit makes sure that the families that do enroll are doing so because they genuinely desire what this program has to offer, not because they couldn’t find a spot elsewhere.

The building that Nicole and Aubrey constructed on Fair Oaks Boulevard seems to be a fairly straightforward representation of who they are: people who are deeply anchored in their community, formed by their professional frustrations, and really concerned in preserving what they refer to as the enchantment of childhood. The kind of question that only time can answer is whether that ideology changes or scales as the center grows. For now, the program organizer arranges tours, the waiting room fills up, and on a weekday morning in the backyard, kids are working on the extremely vital but unglamorous task of understanding how the world works.