Deborah DeLisle

Deborah DeLisle has spent more than twenty years asking a question that still drives her work today:

What if school could look a whole lot more like real life?

Her path into education was anything but straight.

More than twenty-five years ago, Debbie was working with farmers and Cooperative Extension in the mountains of Western North Carolina, helping small farms explore agritourism as another way to make a living from their land. From there came a preschool. Then an after-school program. Then summer camps.

And eventually, an entire school.

Along the way, Debbie built the formal educational foundation to support the work she was already discovering in practice. She earned an Associate of Science with studies in Art and Engineering from Western Michigan, followed by a Bachelor of Science in Early Childhood and Elementary Education in Western North Carolina, with teaching licensure spanning birth through sixth grade. She later completed graduate-level work through UNC in organizational management, early childhood administration, and experiential education.

Her professional training also includes CPR and Wilderness First Aid certification, along with extensive work in Nonviolent Communication, conflict resolution, community building, nonprofit leadership, and grassroots initiatives.

But much of what Debbie knows about education was also learned by doing it.

What began small grew into a farm, forest, arts, and project-based learning community that Debbie spent 17 years building and leading in Madison County, North Carolina. Over the years, the program grew to serve more than 100 students with a staff of more than 30 educators, becoming a place where academics were intentionally woven into real work, meaningful projects, food, farming, art, nature, and community.

Children didn't just learn about growing food—they grew it.

Beginning in second grade, students managed their own garden plots. They planned, planted, harvested, cooked, preserved, experimented, failed, tried again, and shared surplus food with their community.

Math showed up because something needed to be measured. Writing mattered because there was something worth communicating. Science was happening under their feet. Art, music, food, building, business, relationships, and responsibility weren't extras squeezed in around the "real" learning.

They were the real learning.

That experience fundamentally shaped Debbie's understanding of what children are capable of when they are trusted with meaningful work, given room to wonder, and surrounded by adults willing to learn alongside them.

It also taught her that a school can become much more than a school.

Following Hurricane Helene in 2024, when neighboring mountain communities were devastated and schools throughout the region closed, the learning center opened its doors free of charge to children from across the surrounding counties. For three weeks, roughly 150 children a day came together for full days of steadiness, outdoor play, art, food, meaningful work, and community while the adults around them began the enormous work of recovery.

The experience reinforced something Debbie had come to believe deeply over the years: children don't only need communities to take care of them. They need opportunities to discover that they can help take care of their communities, too.

After moving across the state line to Tennessee, Debbie stepped away from the school she had spent 17 years helping build and began asking another question:

What comes next?

The answer became Regenerate Education Lab—a way to take everything she had learned from decades of building programs, working with children and teachers, making plenty of mistakes, solving problems, and watching remarkable things happen when education becomes connected to real life—and use it to help new learning communities take root.

That work eventually brought her to Foothill Frolic Farm.

When Debbie met Matthew and Allie and began learning about their vision for this land, something felt remarkably familiar. They were imagining many of the same things she had spent years working toward: children learning through projects, nature, food, craftsmanship, responsibility, community, curiosity, and real work.

Today, Debbie works alongside Matthew and Allie to help design and develop Foothill Frolic Farm & Forest School—from its project-based learning model and academic foundations to its curriculum, Teacher Guide resources, assessment practices, community partnerships, and the thousand little questions involved in turning a big idea into an actual school.

She brings decades of experience in education and program development.

Matthew and Allie bring a remarkable farm, a lifetime of skills and knowledge, and a vision deeply rooted in their family's land.

And together, they are building something new.

Debbie still believes what years of working alongside children have taught her again and again:

Then see what happens.