29 Jan Partnering For Working Families: Full Day Preschool With Indoor After Care

To make Tiny Trees accessible and affordable for families we are excited to be exploring how we can offer before and after care for working families. In the last few weeks a number of potential partners have expressed interest in working with us and we are excited to find a way to offer families the choice of indoor after care with a licensed child care provider. Each neighborhood has different potential partners: the Associated Recreation Council (ARC) offers low-cost childcare in community centers and Parks facilities across the city and could be an excellent partner, in some case it would be possible for children to never have to leave the park! Others could be the YMCA or neighborhood day care centers that have surplus space in the afternoon (since some families only do half day care). In West Seattle a retired preschool teacher even suggested she could work as a nanny share and offering indoor after care at the local library or other indoor public space.

What a day with before and after care could look like:

7am – Optional early drop off at indoor child care facility next to or within your neighborhood park

8:45am – transportation to Tiny Trees Preschool start

9am – Tiny Trees academic classes begin

3pm – End of classes, transportation to after care facility

6pm or earlier – pickup at after care facility

Tiny Trees Preschool aims to be accessible to all families. For many lower income parents before and after care is essential, in many cases it is the most important factor in choosing a school. Also, as one of our new board members pointed out recently access to childcare is one of the biggest barriers to women keeping an equal place in the workforce. By partnering to offer before and after care Tiny Trees will help make quality Preschool not only affordable, but accessible as well.

We will make sure to keep you updated as this rolls out. Our goal is to have a plan in place for after care when we announce where our schools will be located in the fall of this year. Not all sites will have after care and some sites may only be a half day (4hr) program. Stay tuned and spread the word to other families. The more folks that enroll online and cast a vote for after-care the easier it will be to find a quality partner.

By Andrew Jay – CEO of Tiny Trees Preschool, andrew@tinytrees.org