A half-century ago, two groups of parents—one in Inverness, the other in Point Reyes Station—brainstormed over their respective kitchen tables about what to do with their toddlers. The parents needed to work each day, and their children needed companionship and stimulation, but there weren’t any preschools in town. So they created their own, never suspecting that the two would become one, uniting to become a celebrated Point Reyes Station institution, the Papermill Creek Children’s Corner. 

Next week, the school will celebrate 50 years of launching happy and creative kids into the universe from its tiny patch of earth on the north side of town.

Back in 1972, Inverness parents recruited 27 youngsters for the inaugural class of the Inverness Playgroup, located in the living room of Wade and Sandra Holland’s historic Highland Lodge. They transformed the place into a veritable playland, complete with hobbit-sized furniture and a play structure in the yard. They hired a teacher and a teacher’s assistant, set tuition, and moved to bigger locations around town as their program evolved over the years.

Meanwhile, across Tomales Bay, the other group started smaller. They were five families, each with one kid and not much money. Theirs would be an informal co-op, rotating from house to house with each parent hosting the kids in their living room one day a week. The other four days, the moms and dads were free to work. They eventually received education grants under Home Start and added more families. For a time, they operated out of the Olema Druids Hall.

The Playgroup offered a half-day program; Home Start engaged children from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Both schools operated in several locations for the next decade before joining forces around 1981. The preschool later moved onto the Dance Palace property, a community arts space being designed and constructed by idealistic volunteers funded by generous local donors and grants. The Dance Palace and the school were built around the same time.

“We were all very young, just starting our new families and experimenting,” said Elisabeth Ptak, an original Home Start parent who worked in a handcrafted jewelry shop at the time. “It was a time of experimentation.”

With money tight, parent involvement was crucial. “There’s always been a need for parents to cooperate to some degree or another,” Ms. Ptak said. “And I think that’s the school’s strength—family involvement.”

Merging two schools with similar philosophies proved challenging at first. They had to agree on a common program and negotiate such basic issues such as whether to continue Home Start’s lunch program. They did.

“Having lunch meant the parents didn’t have to pack one, and everyone had the same thing,” said Wendy Friefeld, Papermill’s first director. “The children sat together without looking at who had cookies and who didn’t, and who had the Barbie lunchbox and who didn’t. It was a really good equalizer.”

But even working out the menu posed challenges. “We had huge discussions about whether the yogurt should be plain or fruit-filled, which had sugar in it,” Ms. Friefeld recalled. “Parent involvement—you’ve got to love it.”

They eventually opted for sugar-free.

For parents who needed to work, the school was a godsend. “I would probably not have pursued my career without Papermill,” said Loretta Farley, a board member whose son attended the school in the 1990s. Ms. Farley and her husband, Gus Conde, both worked as park rangers at the time. “Marin is very expensive, so having two incomes was pretty essential,” she said.

Bobbi Loeb, one of the original Home Start parents, was the head teacher at Papermill for 15 years. She had been a substitute teacher for a time in Harlem before hitchhiking to California to seek her fortune when she was in her 20s. She eventually got a teaching certificate, specializing in early childhood education.

“When you’re a preschool teacher, you’re never off,” she said. “You are constantly on because anything can happen. You’ve got kids running around the playground, kids here, kids there. It’s like having a child multiplied by 15.”

She took them on all kinds of outdoor adventures, hiking at Limantour and exploring trails at Bear Valley. But one lesson stands out in her memory. Each year, she would get fertile eggs from Tacherra Ranch in Bolinas and put them in an incubator. The kids would count down the 28 days until they hatched.

“They would hold them, and I taught them to tell each other to be very careful and not squeeze the chicks because their bones were smaller than your pinkie,” Ms. Loeb said. “We learned all about chicks and chickens. Eventually, they started jumping out of their boxes and running around the school.”

That’s when it was time to take the chicks back to Bolinas and learn about their life on a farm.

Papermill Creek still emphasizes outdoor learning. In fact, said Lourdes Romo, the school’s current director, the kids spend 95 percent of their time outdoors—part of an effort to inoculate them against the laptop/gamer/couch-potato lifestyle that has become the new normal for kids nationwide.

When they do go indoors, they have two spacious classrooms overflowing with art, books and toys—all designed to stimulate thinking, creativity and social skills. It’s preschool nirvana. 

There are books about Martin Luther King and Barack Obama, and there’s even a book about a popsicle: “What Can We Do With A Paleta?” There are many things you can do with a popsicle, it turns out. You can make yourself a colored mustache while it melts. More importantly, you can share it with your friend.

The program has been fully bilingual for the last six years, and 65 percent of the students are Latino. Tuition is charged on a sliding scale, and 80 percent of the students receive scholarships. They range in age from 2 to 4, and they have five attentive teachers looking after them.

Wearing jeans and cowboy boots, 4-year-old Emmanuel Mejia arrived at school on Monday with his mom, Fabiola Mejia. “We love this community,” she said. “It’s very important for me to know where he comes every day, and to know that he feels safe. He loves the teachers, and he feels safe.”

That was the goal from the beginning, but none of the original parents imagined the informal schools they started half a century ago would become an enduring community landmark.

“We weren’t thinking 50 years into the future,” Ms. Ptak said. “That seemed like something old people would do.”

Papermill Creek’s 50th anniversary celebration takes place on Saturday, April 29 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the outdoor space between the school and the Dance Palace. Featuring food, drinks, music and the Marin County Free Library’s Learning Bus.