About Miss Christel

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Christel Hino is on the autism spectrum, a mom of a 24-year-old daughter and a 10-year-old son, and a registered nurse currently working part-time at a hospital in Seattle. As a neurodivergent parent and educator rooted in Snohomish County, she is deeply interested in building communities where children can thrive. For the past five years, she used Sonder Life as a secular, community-based homeschool program that brought diverse people together throughout COVID. Teaching parents and kids a good understanding of self-monitoring, exposure risks, and general infection control while valuing vaccinated and unvaccinated families equally.  She brought free classes to diverse families across the county, grounded in a solid scientific understanding of risks and benefits of the outside community during a national crisis. After the COVID lockdown ended, she started using her home and public spaces as a rotating classroom, encouraging parents to guide rather than instruct alongside her, and watching children learn and grow while valuing diversity, community, free play, and intrinsic motivation. It can sometimes seem like a radical idea that children already know how to learn, or that diversity breeds higher intelligence, but it is a scientific fact :). Humans are wired to learn from birth, and we are also a community species that thrives in fellowship. We also learn from others, sometimes that means responding to “I cannot do this” with validation and encouragement, and requires a parent or educator to watch children struggle through their difficulties, and sometimes it means answering a call for help with a hand to lighten the burden. Ideally, either is done with encouraging smiles and full faith in the child's ability to succeed, maybe by giving up on one idea and trying another. Sometimes it means stepping in to decrease harm or increase efficiency when asked. Almost always, it means opening a child’s world to possibilities and waiting to see which ones light them up.

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Christel holds a Bachelor of Science in Nursing and has plans to continue her lifelong learning journey by obtaining her Nurse Practitioner license in Psychiatry. She brings twenty years of acute and critical care nursing experience across emergency medicine, geriatric psychiatry, acute medical and surgical care, home health, and the float pool — where she might start her day in a psychiatric unit and end it in the emergency room. She gets bored doing the same thing twice, which turns out to be useful in education. Her experience with vulnerable adults and children in clinical settings has shaped her understanding of what people need before learning can even begin. She believes many people in today’s middle-class society are operating at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and that the self-actualization space is a triangle of its own, one that can make people feel like they’re back at the bottom, in survival mode, even when their basic needs are technically met. The middle years can be among the most turbulent in a human life, and meeting people in that trauma without flinching is her specialty. For Christel, teaching and nursing are intertwined. Learning and healing are part of every human journey. Her approach with children and adults alike: assess the individual, recognize patterns, respond with precision and care, treat the whole system, reassess, set boundaries, and above all, never give up.

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As someone who had a dynamic and unconventional childhood herself, and as the parent of a neurodivergent child with dyslexia and ARFID, she understands from the inside what it feels like when a system is built for a brain that isn’t “typical”. She also understands the difference between real learning and conditioning. Differences are not deficits. But understanding oneself, one’s deepest needs, desires, and sources of inspiration, that takes time and deliberate attention. Her aim is to provide scaffolding for kids to build their own journeys through these middle years that will serve them for a lifetime.

Her philosophy is not about indulgence, entertainment, or ease. She believes children are capable of hard work, especially when internally motivated. Learning new things is difficult. Making mistakes is difficult. Sitting with not-knowing and trying again is difficult. And that is exactly where real, deep learning lives. Her role is to create conditions in which a child encounters something genuinely hard and, from within themselves, finds a reason to push through it. Agency cannot be imposed externally, but it can be cultivated. What better place to do that than inside a safe and loyal community, where struggle is expected, and support is guaranteed.

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She loves to hyperfocus on research into human development and learning. This is, for her, less a professional obligation than a genuine obsession. She reads voraciously across sociology, neuroscience, and child development. If you have a book recommendation, please send it her way. Her biggest influences include Maria Montessori’s understanding of the prepared environment, Rudolf Steiner’s insights into developmental stages and the inner life of the child, John Holt’s observations of how children learn when freed from coercion, and the democratic governance model pioneered by schools like Sudbury Valley. Everything is filtered through reproducible evidence, the lived experiences of others, and her own hard-won mistakes as an individual, a parent, a homeschool community leader, and a medical clinician.

So now she’s launching a middle years program for tweens and teens, ages 10–14 or so, partly because her own son needs a community for his learning journey, and partly because she has watched too many children and adults struggle with the isolation and anxiety that come from living too individually. She found her own answer in Miss Victoria and Hawthorn Hearth. She pulled her five-year-old Lotus Belle tent out of the woods and planted it in the yard at Orca House in North Everett. Miss Victoria’s 120-year-old second home is now turning into a school. The two of them believe that a democratically governed middle years program and a warmly structured early childhood program fit together like peas and carrots. Older kids learn to lead and share space with younger children, and nothing teaches patience quite like that. Miss Christel feels that the warm tones and rhythms of an early childhood environment are exactly the right backdrop for children blooming out of childhood and into the hormonal, beautiful, complicated territory of adolescence.

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The program runs routinely on Thursdays and Fridays, 11am to 4pm, and without routine the rest of the week. The children soon learn to manage and budget their time each week, both individually and as a community. Being a part of Snohomish and King County is such a privilege. The kids can learn to navigate their social and physical communities, make schedules, pursue their own projects, and explore a world that ranges from beautiful nature parks and the Puget Sound to world-class libraries and museums. Kids develop their own learning goals individually and as a group. They make decisions, write proposals, manage a budget, ride public transit, hold democratic meetings, and practice self-governance and compromise as daily skills. They spend real time outside, every day, because the developing brain needs fresh air, movement, risk, and physical mastery. In the Pacific Northwest, there is no bad weather, just bad gear.

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Christel doesn’t teach children what to think or how to get things done. She teaches them how to use the opportunities and resources around them to develop their own thoughts. She shows them how to get to know themselves and each other deeply, and, maybe most importantly in our divided country, how to value diversity and community. Her goal is for kids to move into the future as competent, confident people who know how to learn, when and how to ask for help, and how to try, fail, and try again.