THE MORNING SCHOOL run proceeds, at first glance, like any number of demographically adjacent — affluent, socially progressive, private — school runs the world over: There are lithe yoga moms, dads with beards and the occasional man bun, kids with Messi jerseys and top-heavy backpacks. There are hurried embraces and pods of parents, to-go lattes in hand, swapping information and gossip. This boisterous procession — from filing past the security guard to the mass exodus when the first-period bell sounds — takes 10 minutes before calm descends.

But at Bali’s Green School, if you look past the familiarities of this ritual, incongruities begin to emerge, as in a spot-the-differences puzzle from a children’s workbook. First, that bell is a gong. Second, there is the incontrovertible fact that the school is in the jungle — some 20 acres of rolling terrain abutting the Ayung (Bali’s longest river) in the district of Abiansemal, about a half-hour southwest of Ubud. Then there’s the fact that almost all of the structures — even the basketball backboards — are made of bamboo. These are no simple huts, but grand, occasionally towering wall-less structures, graceful and whimsical, that resemble some southern extension of “The Lord of the Rings.” Sometimes, during the rainy season, the rain will fall so hard on the roof that the teachers (prefaced with the Balinese honorifics pak or ibu) temporarily halt lessons because they can’t be heard. Shoes are optional. Students read from the well-stocked (if mildew-prone) library, but they have also built bridges and bamboo bikes — as well as the school playground.

While some schools might employ the word “green” in the context of their LEED-certified building or cafeteria recycling effort, this place takes green to another level. Instead of SUVs, kids might show up in used-cooking-oil-fueled Bio Buses (another project led by students, one of whom recently represented Indonesia at the 2017 Miss World pageant). School lunch is cooked with sawdust fuel from a local bamboo farm, and served on ingka, or straw baskets with a compostable banana-leaf lining. There is a menagerie of rabbits, pigs and chickens. (The fourth-graders took out a loan to buy the chickens, and now raise them and sell their eggs, in a typically immersive Green School introduction to economics.) There’s a food-generating aquaponics facility, and an aviary for the endangered Bali starling. There is the occasional snake — the music teacher found a bright-green viper under the mixing board one morning — but there’s a “snake man” who can be summoned to remove particularly dangerous ones. A mud pit, not far from the kindergarten, is for mepantigan, a Balinese martial art, often practiced in nearby rice fields. Even after the kids have gone to class, one still finds surprising numbers of parents milling about, enticed by the open-air cafe (the best coffee for miles), the biweekly on-site farmer’s market or the chocolate-matcha macaroons at Living Food Lab, a raw restaurant run by a Finnish school parent. Not to mention the Wi-Fi.