Pre-School and Working Parents

How do 2 working parent households handle Pre-School and Pre-School with another in Day Care? Right now Daycare works due to longer hours, we can leave and come home and it works to drop off and pick up the babies. Pre-school has shorter hours.... Help!!

The Y in my town (Madison) has a wrap program for Kindergarten. You might have a similar option through South Mountain YMCA for pre-school.

We would need 7 to 7 coverage

We struggled until we replaced day care with a nanny.

For a while, we had our older child in a half day preschool and arranged for the day care (who had our younger child) to pick her up and keep both until the end of day. It sort of worked but was pretty stressful as the daycare did not have the longest hours. It also was painful was managing two different vacation schedules.

BubbaTerp said:
How do 2 working parent households handle Pre-School and Pre-School with another in Day Care? Right now Daycare works due to longer hours, we can leave and come home and it works to drop off and pick up the babies. Pre-school has shorter hours.... Help!!

Many of the daycares have a strong preschool program. We were very happy with Village Babies when my now-kindergartener was still in daycare. My younger son is in a different program near my work but we'll likely move him local when it's preschool time. Consider programs like the Y, Village Babies, Little Stages, which all have good preschools and offer full-day coverage.

Our district is moving all of its pre-school programming to the Montrose School Bldg in SO in a couple weeks. I don't know about 7-7 coverage, but I do know the Y offers before- and after-care for working parents (we use the after-care for our son but pick-up by 5PM, so I don't know how late it goes).

BubbaTerp said:
We would need 7 to 7 coverage

The Y in Maplewood has 7 to 7 coverage.

I think Le Parc Place has 7-7 coverage. Maybe Village Babies does too, certainly 7-6.30.

skadave said:

BubbaTerp said:
We would need 7 to 7 coverage

The Y in Maplewood has 7 to 7 coverage.

+1

We couldn't have survived those years without our au pairs. Every childcare situation has a trade off. We preferred having someone who could work a split-shift and not cost an arm and a leg. Trade off was that they lasted only a year or so, and they needed more attention up front because it was also a cultural exchange program. In the long run it has been great for our kids who now have these friends around the world.