ESCC Parent's Handbook -- Section I

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to Early Start Children’s Center. To introduce you to our center we have created this handbook. Please read it carefully and feel free to ask us any questions you may have. It covers our philosophy, safety regulations, business policies, and expectations.

OUR MISSION STATEMENT

Our center is dedicated to the well being of the children and their families.
We are committed to providing a safe, loving, and stimulating environment.
We encourage open communication and participation.
We are always open to constructive input from parents and staff.
While we make every effort to maintain a quality program, we are constantly in search of ways to improve.
We will involve the entire community by offering parenting workshops, field trips and family social events.
We appreciate your choosing our center and are committed to fulfilling your highest expectations.

OUR PHILOSOPHY

Here at Early Start our goal is to nurture the whole child. It is our intention to make your child’s early years special. We intend to provide a quality educational program within a loving and caring environment. An important part of this goal is the caring adults who will give your child personal attention.

Early Start Children’s Center follows a “Building Blocks” philosophy, which is developmental in nature with concerns for the needs of the whole child. This philosophy has evolved over 20 + years of experience working with teachers, young children, and their parents with its roots at Kathy’s “Building Blocks Nursery” School, our sister school in Dracut, MA.

Although intellectual development is an important “block” in our program, we feel it must be balanced with social, emotional, and physical development to provide children with a strong foundation for their future success.

If you attempt to build a block tower by stacking one block at a time in a single narrow column, it will stand on its own for the first few blocks. As you build the tower higher, it will become less stable and adding additional blocks will take greater effort to be sure the balance is maintained. Eventually, no matter how hard you try, the tower will tumble. Building a strong level foundation will help the tower stand on its own as it grows in size. Placing a group of blocks all the same size at the base will make the tower much stronger.

This is also true of learning! If the concentration is only on one aspect of development, without making sure that the children have a strong level foundation, it is easy to throw them off balance. Then, through no fault of their own, they may struggle or be unable to be successful. Our goal here at Early Start is to give each child a strong level foundation by offering the “Building Blocks” curriculum, which values all aspects of development because they are all important for successful learning and for life.

We also realize that parents who work outside the home while raising young children are facing an enormous challenge. Our goal is to help you meet this challenge by providing an environment where you will feel comfortable leaving your child and offering ourselves as a resource for any parenting, developmental, or behavioral questions or concerns you might have. Our goal is not only to have happy children, but happy stress-free parents as well. We will strive to involve the entire family in the education process by offering parenting workshops and family social events.

COMMUNICATION

Good communication is of the utmost importance to us. We want to share openly any concerns or questions that our new families might have. We welcome questions, suggestions, or discussions of any kind that are oriented towards a positive outcome for the children and their families.

It is our goal to create a monthly newsletter for parents that will inform you about some of the activities we are doing, the current curriculum topics, special events that will be happening that month, or any other pertinent, fun information that may be of interest to your family.
Since safety of the children is of utmost importance to our entire staff, we will also include reminders of our safety policies, such as traffic patterns when picking up and dropping off your child, seat belt safety, and our release policies.

For your convenience, information concerning our center is also available on our website at www.escc-hudson.com.

GRIEVANCES

Any parent having questions or concerns pertaining to student/staff relationships, classroom procedures, teacher actions, etc. should initially direct their questions to the staff member concerned. After having discussed the issue with this individual, if the matter is not resolved to your satisfaction, it should be brought to the attention of the center directors

Back to Handbook Contents