The Family Cooperative Model

We are a small school, with space for only 6 children each year. Our cooperative families form a close community of support, getting to know one another’s children and other family members and forging friendships beyond the classroom.

A parent cooperative preschool model is simply a group of parents joining forces, hiring a teacher (or two) and forming a non-profit.  It is an alternative form of childcare that stands apart from other models with an emphasis on parent and family learning, and acknowledges parenthood as a profession. We will require one parent from each family to volunteer a small number of hours in some capacity. However, fee tiers allow for different levels of involvement. While time in the classroom is one form of volunteering, there are also opportunities to help in administration, fundraising and special projects.

One of our goals is to provide our cooperative families with opportunities for continued learning and growth surrounding parenting and early childhood education. This might take the form of workshops we offer internally and opportunities for one-on-one learning with our lead teacher, or even parents learning from each other.

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Why We Honor Play

Play makes animals smarter

“Animal behaviorists have observed that the smarter the species, the more its youngsters engage in physical play. Roughhousing releases a chemical called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). As Margot Sunderland writes in The Science of Parenting, BDNF is like fertilizer for our brains. It helps stimulate neuron growth within the cortex and hippocampus, both of which are vital to higher learning, memory, and advanced behavior such as language and logic. Put simply, play makes animals smarter.” 

Anthony T. DeBenedet & Lawrence J. Cohen, The Ar t of Roughhousing; Good Old-Fashioned Horseplay and Why Every Kid Needs It, 2010. 

Child Led Play

“When play is allowed to be child driven, children practice decision-making skills, move at their own pace, discover their own areas of interest, and ultimately engage fully in the passions they wish to pursue. Ideally, much of play involves adults, but when play is controlled by adults, children acquiesce to adult rules and concerns and lose some of the benefits play offers them, particularly in developing creativity, leadership, and group skills” 

American Academy of Pediatrics,“The Importance of Play in Promoting Healthy Child Development and Maintaining Strong Parent-Child Bonds,” 2007. 

Play is a human right

“Play is so important to optimal child development that it has been recognized by the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights as a right of every child…we must advocate for the changes specific to the need of each child’s social and environmental context that would enhance the opportunities for play ” 

American Academy of Pediatrics,“The Importance of Play in Promoting Healthy Child Development and Maintaining Strong Parent-Child Bonds,” 2007. 

Body, Brain & Spirit

“Roughhousing activates many different parts of the body and the brain, from the amygdalae, which processes emotions, and the cerebellum, which handles complex motor skills, to the prefrontal cortex, which makes high-level judgments. The result is that every roughhousing playtime is beneficial for body and brain as well as for the loftiest levels of the human spirit: honor, integrity, morality, kindness, and cooperation. 

Bekoff, Marc & Pierce, Jessica., Wild Justice:The Moral Lives of Animals, 2010. 

Knowing one another

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”

Plato 

Real Learning

“Real learning is a process of discovery, and if we want it to happen, we must create the kinds of conditions in which discoveries are made. We know what these are. They include: time, leisure, freedom and lack of pressure.”

John Holt