Co-oping refers to the time spent working with the children, parents, and teachers in your child’s class. Parents co-op on a bi-weekly or weekly basis. In the 2–3 year old class, parents co-op bi-weekly. In the 3-4 year old class, most parents co-op bi-weekly, and a few co-op weekly. In the 4-5 year old class, most parents co-op weekly and roughly a third of the parents co-op bi-weekly.
Some families choose to share their classroom co-oping duties. We have found that greater consistency for children and adults is gained, in terms of familiarity with each other, routines, and classroom practices, if one person works in the classroom. This is not always possible and in many cases, both parents want to be involved, so the parents work together with the staff to help create comfortable and smooth transitions for all involved.
A co-oping parent shared this with us about co-oping on a weekly basis, “Weekly co-op is the reason the school is the school. Period. All these kids have become my kids. They all know me and I know them. This level of mutual comfort means that I can do my job without transitions at school AND it has the added bonus of the ability to have LOTS of transitions-free playdates (the kind where the parent just waves from the car as the kid runs happily up a friend’s porch steps). Remember the ‘Circle of Trust’ from ‘Meet the Parents’? Another benefit is the consistency with the co-oping team. When you work with the same parents every week, you get into a groove and are able to adjust to the individual skill sets of each parent. Without weekly co-oping, we’d all be temps rather than colleagues.
