California is starting to implement universal “transitional kindergarten”, which is an additional year of elementary school and is run through the public school system. The aftercare is combined with the Kindergarten classes.They’ve been rolling it out slowly based on when your kid is born (I.e this year everybody who turns 4 before June I think is eligible, next year everybody who turns 4 before Sept 2 will be).
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Yeah, the preschool I’m talking about here is through the school system as well and 1/2 day is free for children in the year before they qualify to start kindergarten. But a lot of parents have to keep their kids in daycare instead because the preschool is either only 1/2 day, or if you are lucky and lottery in to a full day class you still have the terrible hours associated with full day and there is no before or after care available for preschoolers. My girls will both be in full day preschool this year, at the elementary school, but the preschool hours are 7:45 - 2:15. The elementary is 7:30 - 2:30, which still sucks but the elementary kids can do after care.
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The very affluent (median house price $2.8 million) city next to me is even worse. They have AM and PM kindergarten and don’t tell the parents which one until 2 days before school starts.
If we didn’t get into aftercare we’d probably have to go with one of the local daycares that does bus pickup from school. Our current daycare doesn’t have a school age program and all the kids my son’s age are moving on.
Fortunately aftercare is a lot cheaper than daycare because we’re also going to be paying a lot of babysitters 
. Look at the month of November - all the circles/triangles/stars/slashes are days off.
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Whoa that’s a lot of days off.
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It’s called no-school November for a reason!
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We’re definitely in a time of transition, societally, with this whole idea of publicly-funded pre-k. Other countries have been doing it forever but ours, nope. We have only had Head Start. There’s a huge gap between daycares/private preschools and the public K-12 system. Privates are set up to run year-round and don’t have a million days off and holidays and staff development days, etc. And they are the after care. The public K-12 system worries itself with none of that. The States provide the funding for a 180-day school year, and the districts have to figure it out. So there’s generally not much going on during the summer, few positions have more than the 180 contracted days, and things like “What’s a working parent supposed to do with their kid who gets out of school at 2:20pm and they still work until 5?” are not issues the school districts have ever really had to deal with. The solution was to partner with private child care establishments to fill in the gaps, and the parents pay for it. Usually the closest the school district comes to being a part of that after-care situation is that they might provide space for it to happen, but the employees are not school district employees and the program is not run by the district. Now that pre-k is becoming part of the school districts’ offerings, a whole new slew of responsibilities are showing up that don’t fit into the previous model. As usual in education, they are building the plane as they fly it. And the parents are, understandably, saying wtf?
I hope, in time, we can get our abysmal pre-k system sorted into something better for kids and families. We seem to be headed there, oh so painfully slowly, but at least some states are going in the right direction. But boy it’s a rocky journey!
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I get it, it’s so rough. We were planning on DH either getting a job or going back to school once the girls started full time school but we don’t know if that is possible now, considering a full day is still so short and there are so many damn days off school 
Colorado actually has the shortest school year of any state with only 160 days per year of school. Here’s all of our days off school.
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Cuckoo is not going to school yet and I don’t work Mondays - maybe we can work something out! I would hate for those days to be a limiting factor. Actually that’s part of why I don’t work Mondays 
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Are staff development days a new thing in the past 15 years? I definitely don’t remember having that time off as a kid.
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They are newer, and every year for our school district the number of them go up. It’s part of the negotiations they do with the teacher’s union every year. The three in green were just added a few weeks ago, as part of the negotiation for this school year.
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I think this year we will be ok because I have almost 200 hours of annual leave saved up so I can take off every day the girls are off. But once I blow through my backlog things are going to be harder. If he’s working then we can hopefully afford to pay for camps/childcare but who knows how it will all play out. Eventually they will be old enough to take care of themselves while I work from home.
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There was an article in the LATimes last year about the fact that 4 year olds developmentally tend to have way more bathroom accidents than 5 year olds and LAUSD did not have the staffing (aides) to deal with it and seemed wholly unprepared.
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Colorado’s universal preK program is mostly run through private care centers! I imagine that helps as far as being set up to care for kids that young. They continue to provide care for 4-5 year olds, and then both providers and parents have to apply to the program to be covered. Everyone is eligible for 15 hours/week of coverage, and then households below 270% of the federal poverty line AND have a “qualifying factor” (homelessness, dual language, IEP, <100% of federal poverty line, in foster care) get additional hours.
It’s definitely still in the works. There were a lot of kinks last year with funding and staffing and matching… so hopefully it only improves in the future.
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In early intervention, we don’t even consider it a developmental delay if a 4-year-old isn’t potty trained. Like, we’ll put it as a family priority on the kid’s plan if the family wants (they usually do), but it won’t be part of the child’s goals. Because it’s really not a disability or a delay, which is what we’re working on. But in general education K-12, no one wants to think about toileting. The system is not set up for that, meaning we don’t have the staff for that, as is being noticed. That whole ratios thing that applies in daycare settings is not a part of K-12 schools.
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Well, if you are caught off guard by one of the secret extra PD days that the ECE teachers have, you know where to find me! At my kids’ school they didn’t advertise them well and they weren’t on the school calendar.
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Less parenting and more kid nutrition science I guess?
My pediatrician gave me the all clear to stop giving Mo iron supplements. But it seems like invariably, when she gets them she sleeps better that night.
Is it likely this is causal? Would iron absorb and levels rise enough one day to make the body have enough iron to sleep better? And then fall enough to sleep worse the following day?
Or is there another vitamin that may be present that absorbs/depletes quickly that affects sleep?
For reference, I’m using Poly-Vi-Sol.
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There are SO many variables that feed into kid sleep that I would be extremely hesitant to say it’s the iron. But that’s just me.
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Yeah I want to go off of it because it tastes gross and can cause some constipation. Just there seems to be a very clear no vitamins worse sleep yes vitamins good sleep correlation.
Are you giving it in the morning? I suppose it’s possible that vitamin D in the morning is helping cement the circadian rhythms, especially given with her low vision state isn’t there a concern with circadian rhythms? Vitamin D can absolutely interplay with melatonin production at night time. iron, I wouldn’t see a very quick same day mechanism like that. Magnesium yes, but that’s not in poly vi sol right? And it does have vit D?
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I tend to give it around mid afternoon.
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