On a gray winter afternoon last month, students at Open Air Village spent their last few school-day moments in their play yard outside the McGregor Building at Antioch College as teachers began to round them up to go home.

Youngsters gathered cast-off gloves and hats from slides, hay bales and a sandbox.

“Over there is the ‘burning bush’,” Open Air Village co-founder Nicole Gay said, gesturing toward the edge of the yard and a large shrub, where children disappeared and reappeared as though the branches were the entrance to a fort. “The kids love to play in it.”

Open Air Village — the nature-based early childhood education program Nicole and Bryan Gay launched during the pandemic on the Antioch campus — is operating at the college through the end of the school year.

Beginning this summer, however, the program expects to relocate to a home on President Street, provided the Village approves a zoning variance that would allow the Gays to operate an in-home child care program there.

The expected pivot is the latest for the Gays who, after nearly six years of running their program, have gotten used to being adaptable.

After several years of running outdoor education workshops in public parks and working in different early childhood settings, the Gays established Open Air Village in the summer of 2020 in the former Children’s Montessori Cooperative space inside the Sontag-Fels building on Antioch’s campus. As the Gays told the News in 2021, their approach, which centers nature immersion and open-ended play for children ages 3–5, proved fairly compatible with COVID-era safety restrictions, and they later expanded to include after-school care, offering students and families a longer relationship with Open Air Village.

“When we bring children in, it feels like they’re our family,” Nicole Gay said.

Nearly five years into Open Air Village’s tenure at Antioch, however, a potential shift was in the wind. Last March, the News reported that the Sontag-Fels building was under contract by Columbus-based Windsor Companies; though Windsor now owns and plans to develop the campus’s former student union, at the time of the News report last year, Windsor representatives indicated that they had not made any concrete plans to pursue development at Sontag-Fels. They did say, however, that the building would likely need to be demolished for development to be an option.

By phone this week, Windsor’s head designer Jason Dorsey said the company is not actively working toward formalizing a purchase of Sontag-Fels at this time. However, he added that the company is working to pursue an Ohio Demolition Land Grant on Antioch’s behalf to help cover the cost of razing Sontag-Fels, an intention the company also communicated last year.

At that time, Dorsey told the News that, if the company did move forward with plans for development at Sontag-Fels, the team would be “committed” to keeping Open Air Village on site — an affirmation the Gays said they took to heart.

“There were assurances made to us, primarily through Windsor, that we were going to be a part of it,” Nicole Gay said.

Bryan Gay said the couple relied on those assurances as they planned for the future.

“We wasted months not looking for a space because we thought we had it,” he said.

According to Nicole Gay, what was previously a potential shift became a reality last August. That month, the couple met with Antioch President Jane Fernandes, who said the building was indeed slated for demolition and Open Air Village would need to move.

It was a tall order for the Gays: the school year was set to open in just a few weeks when they received the news, and they had already signed contracts with new and returning families for the upcoming school year and had revamped the school’s outdoor area, including adding a number of native plants.

The college offered Open Air Village another campus space in McGregor Hall, which includes two classrooms and an office in a hallway with exclusive use by the school, and access to the current play yard, by which the Gays said Antioch students and staff often walk and offer a wave and “hello” to youngsters.

The Gays said the McGregor space, though not as tailored to their needs as Sontag-Fels, has been working well with some adjustments. However, the space was offered temporarily — through the end of the school year this May — so the search for a new home was only delayed. As soon as the school year started, the couple began looking for another location that could preserve the school’s mission and, importantly, keep Open Air Village local.

Nicole Gay said offers came quickly and generously: potential farm space, properties near nature preserves, other buildings in town. But many options, she said, would have meant sacrificing what makes Open Air Village distinctive: daily walking “field trips,” access to Glen Helen and the Antioch Farm and the ability to keep after-school programming.

“These are huge pieces of what we are,” Nicole Gay said.

A solution finally presented itself, quite literally, close to home: a “For Lease” sign appeared right across the street from the Gays’ house.

It seemed perfect, they said: The President Street house, the former home of the late George and Toshiko Asakawa, sits on roughly an acre, with a large U-shaped driveway ideal for drop-offs and a finished basement.

“There’s a full walkout basement that is the size of our old classroom,” Nicole Gay said. “It’s still walking distance to the Glen, it’s still walking distance to Antioch Farm, and the backyard is awesome.”

While still living in their previous rented home, the Gays took a chance and put in an offer to lease the new space. The layout of the home would allow the school portion of the house to be separated from the family’s private living space. The Gays have already begun hosting parent meetings there and envision a part of the upstairs as a gathering area for coffee, conversation and future “Parents Night Out” and parent group meetings.

The only downside, the Gays figured, would be that the move would require downsizing; by state law, the upper limit for in-home childcare models is 12 students. At present, Open Air Village accommodates 14 children.

For that reason, Nicole Gay said, the move is bittersweet, but with Mills Lawn’s planned opening of a preschool program to provide more local early childhood education options in the next few years, the time feels right to downsize.

“And I feel like it just really gets us back to the roots of where we started, with Bryan and me teaching together,” she said.

Longtime teacher Tiffany Ward, who was recently accepted into Glen Helen’s naturalist program, remains part of the core educational team at Open Air Village. Other educators, including music teacher Caryn Diamond, newly hired Jessica Struewing-Grigorian and Jules Molnar, remain connected to the program, but in-home care will primarily be led by the Gays.

Financially, the transition has been draining, the Gays said. The couple has managed overlapping rents at their previous home, the new home and at Antioch to plan for the shift. But even throughout the uncertainty of transition, the Gays said they’ve received nothing but support from the families involved in the school.

“Everybody stayed,” Nicole Gay said of the announcement last year that the center would have to move. “And not only did they stay, but they helped us pack and they helped us move.”

Now, the immediate hurdle is procedural. The Gays plan to appear before the Planning Commission in April to seek the variance required to operate from President Street. In the interim, the Gays’ concern is about creating bonds with neighbors who might have questions about what an in-home care program in their area might look like, operating on weekdays between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. with, at most, 12 kids.

“We did find out there are a few neighbors who are concerned,” Nicole Gay said, adding that she’s in the process of setting up a meeting to chat with neighbors face-to-face, and that she hopes the new setting will eventually deepen community ties. In particular, she pointed to the dormant gardens in the President Street home’s backyard, which the Gays have begun to revive.

“We want to be on good terms with our neighbors, and we found out we have neighbors who are naturalists or avid gardeners — wouldn’t it be cool if we could bring some of those people in to share their experiences with kids?” she said.

Bryan Gay said he remains optimistic that the variance will be approved, and that the future looks bright for Open Air Village. 

“It’s just about having the support of the people around us,” he said.

And despite the upheaval, the couple said their goal of remaining local has not changed.

“We’re not gonna give up,” Nicole Gay said. “We don’t want to leave Yellow Springs.”