The 2020 Annual Report of Stay and Play Preschool ~ Laura Steager, Director

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Our Mission Statement:  Stay and Play provides a preschool and childcare program where both children and adults feel loved, supported and empowered in an environment of compassion, respect and trust.  Each child at Stay and Play is treated as a unique creation and is nurtured in his/her diversity and individuality.

This year that mission rings true!  We have been so fortunate this school year to be able to offer our services during a pandemic.  The compassion, respect and trust have made it all possible.
 
A part-time program licensed by the Dept. of Human Services, for 34 years offering affordable quality childcare and preschool programs to families of our community.  Each year the good reputation of the program continues to bring new students/families via word of mouth.  As a part-time program, we are open September – May and closed for the summer except for a couple weeks of summer camp.  Our enrollment was very close to 100% for 2019-2020.   
 
The 2019-2020 school year ended in March due to the pandemic with our typical 5 classes from 9:00 am-12:00 pm each day: Age 1 –Tiny Tots, Terrific 2’s, Thrillin’ 3’s, Fabulous 4’s and Rainbow 4’s (this class meets only MWF).  Up to March, we continued to offer one afternoon class from 12:00-2:45 pm for 3 & 4 year-olds called Adventure Afternoons.  We also offered Early Morning Drop off for those who needed it up to 14 children from 8:30am-9am. 
 
Over the summer we were able to offer 2 separate weeks of summer camp – all be it at a lower capacity due to COVID-19 safety practices.  One week was a Water themed curriculum and another a Robot Vs. Humans theme.  Both of which focused on STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math) concepts for 8 children 3-5 years-old from 9am-12pm.
 
As we started the new school year in Fall of 2020, we did have to adapt to the changes brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.  With the staff who were able to return and the families who chose to maintain their children’s enrollment, we were able to open 3 classrooms to start the new school year (2020-2021).  We had a 5 day/week class of 3-5 year olds (the Fabulous Foxes), a 3 day/week (MWF) class of 3-5 year olds (the Rainbow Raccoons), and 2 separate classes of 1-2 year old children (the Terrific Tiny Turtles): one 2 days/week (T/TH) and one 3 days/week (MWF). 

Our Teachers to start the year are as follows: 
Foxes – Valerie Anderson & Emma Sutterlin
Raccoons – Aida Pistone & Chrissy Fritton
Turtles – Zsuzsanna Reimherr & Allison Woods   
Alanna Leicht has been able to come in almost every week (2 days/week) to teach a 30-min. music class for each class.  
While we have been affected by SCASD being remote quite a bit throughout the Fall and winter thus far, we have been blessed by some wonderful substitute teachers that made it possible for us to stay open for our families. 
Substitutes: Candi Parsons, Patricia Campalongo, Susan Lee, Lauren Ferrer-Pistone and Melissa Pike 

We have been doing so well with following our Pandemic Procedures and keeping everyone safe, that families reached out for us to open more programming. 
Adapted Adventure Afternoon program reopened mid Nov.: Patt Campalongo & Melissa Pike
AND we have just opened a 4th classroom, the Wonderful Wolves, for 3-5 year olds 3 days/week (MWF) for up to 8 additional children in January 2021: Melissa Pike & Candi Parsons

The S&P families have expressed such great appreciation for our programming and providing a loving, caring and safe place for their children to socialize, learn and grow.  We have been so blessed to be able to re-open during this pandemic and are so very thankful to the SCPC staff, the SCPC medical re-opening support team, EMU, SCPC Session, the S&P families and all of the SCPC members who have supported and prayed for us throughout all of this.
 
Tuition rates are reviewed annually to ensure we are able to sustain the high quality of care we currently provide as well as remaining financially comparable to other childcare providers in this community.  Tuition rates will increase for the next school year as seen below.  We continue to be one of the most reasonably priced programs in the area.  And again last school year (Sept. 2019-May 2020), because the enrollment was high and our families were gracious in donations during the closure, we were able to continue to pay our staff throughout their terms of employment.  In addition, with support from several CARES ACT funding grants and the SCPC PPP Loan Grant, we are hopeful we will meet budget for this current school year as well, without completely using up our reserve funds.  We recognize that we are operating at a bit of a loss this year, however as a non-profit organization, we are here to serve our customers…our families.  And we wanted to do that the best we can, for as long as we can, and fortunately we have been able thus far.  We so appreciate that this church continues supporting its mission to the Stay and Play program - we are truly blessed.

Laura Steager - Director

Aida Pistone - Assistant Director

Our new office!

 We continue to participate in Childcare Information Services (CCIS) programing that provides financial assistance to parents/families who are accepted in the CCIS tuition assistance program.  We also continue to provide tuition assistance ourselves to those with a need for financial assistance but do not qualify for the counties CCIS program.  We assisted 3 families last school year.  We will continue to work at providing tuition assistance to those in need as much as possible.  Maintaining confidentiality for these families continues to be essential.  There is also a staff benefit of 50% off tuition for staff children to attend S&P – we currently have 2 children covered under this benefit and last year we had 6.
 
Typically, we share our operating budget for your information, however this year it was greatly affected by the Pandemic and the grants we received have greatly affected it in ways that are very difficult to represent.  EMU has been kept informed of changes to the budget as needed.  Michelle Fortin, SCPC’s Financial Administrator, has been extremely helpful in assisting me with all adaptations, applications and verifications of grants, monthly finances, etc.  She has been invaluable to me as we faced very different financial situations this year.  Again, with the assistance of Michelle Fortin and the approval of both the SCPC finance committee and EMU, Stay and Play was able to begin offering the use of ACH Debit for monthly tuition payments to our families this school year.  Almost 80% of our families chose to register to use this as their means of payment.  It has been working very well for families and our program.
 
S&P Advisory Team: (*SCPC member    &   **SCPC member & S&P parent)
                *Jane Butler                       Amanda Maitland                            Dianna Danko
                *Pat Strong                         **Brianna Hall Ozaki                       **Sarah McPherson
                *Jody Barth                        Courtney DeVoss                              Caitlyn Foley
                Meghan Fritz                    Aida Pistone, Asst. Director        *Laura Steager, Director

We continued to work with the PSU America Reads program last year which provided 3 students whom each worked 2 -3 days/week for us: Jessica Milan, Ariana Rosa, Madison Hofbauer.  Two of these students had worked with us previous years.  The students are always a wonderful complement to our program.  Unfortunately, with COVID-19, their time with us was cut short and our Advisory Team wisely chose not to include them in our programming for the new school year so that we could minimize exposure risks and keep our classroom pods more intact.
 
A typical Day continues to have:
Block Play, Math games, science experiments, lots of reading books, phonemic awareness work/play, some number and letter recognition, puzzles, floor games, table games, weighing things, measuring things, patterns, matching, all types of concepts (big/small, heavy/light, magnetism, buoyancy, etc.), dress up imaginary play, painting, gluing, folding, cutting, creating art, writing practice, playing with manipulatives to build and learn, working together to build, solve problems, indoor playground play &/or outside park play, music class, music in our classrooms, recycling, composting, celebrating holidays and birthdays, and so much more.  All while having fun!

Last school year (2020) we were able to offer some of our normal parent involvement programming & other extras before we closed March 16th due to COVID-19:

January;  Bi-annual music Experience & Art Show with families, Annual Licensing with the Dept. of Human Services (DHS),

February:  Vision screenings for all 2-5 year olds

COVID CLOSURE: March through May: Teachers offered Facebook Live activities, posted videos of themselves reading stories, doing activities, sharing bits of their quarantine time at home, suggesting activities to do at home, Zoom calls with class meetings and activities, emails, phone calls, visits to write on children’s driveways and leave presents, etc.   We held an end of the year Drive Good-Bye Parade at SCPC/Stay and Play at the end of May to allow the children and families to see the teachers again as they drove by all of us standing along the sidewalks waving goodbye with our signs and balloons.

Over the summer months of June – August, the Administration was very busy with much preparation for the upcoming school year and determining who our staff would be – who was able to return.  This was the busiest summer ever to insure we communicated the best we could about what to expect for the upcoming year as we determined what that would be.  Enrollment for new students (paperwork galore!) we began using fillable PDF’s through Adobe Acrobat which was invaluable due to COVID-19,  writing new policies and procedures that would allow us to open our doors and do our best at meeting the recommendations of OCDEL, PA DOH and CDC, reorganizing how our program would operate, communicating with students/families, helping teachers with preparations, ordering supplies (which this year was primarily PPE equipment and cleaning supplies to insure we would be able to meet all the CDC guidelines and recommendations to the best of our ability), working with other agencies to prepare for the coming school year… and on and on it goes.  And we also had those 2 weeks of summer camp – which while very fun, also gave us great insight into how our programming would run for the school year under the new Pandemic Procedures. 

September: Welcome to everyone in the new school year and the getting to know one another and our new school/classroom rules!  A very different welcome as we now have screening and very specific drop-off and pick up procedures for everyone: Temperature taking, questions to be asked and handwashing with mask wearing. (While parents are not accompanying their children to their classrooms this year we have still been able to find ways to inform them of day to day activities for their children and give parents teacher connections at pick-up and via email.)

October:  Outdoor Halloween Parade for parents in our costumes.

November: Parent/Teacher Conferences (in person with masks or via Zoom), Thanksgiving celebrations, School Picture Days with LifeTouch

December: Christmas, Hanukkah & Kwanza energy, excitement and anticipation ALL month!  We even made cards to be given out with the SCPC Christmas Day Dinners.

We continue to focus on “Play”.  It is the work of children that allows them to learn and grow in developmentally appropriate ways.  
“Play turns out to be so stunningly essential to childhood, it’s like love, sunshine, & broccoli all juiced together.“  - Lenore Skenazy
Play makes my job, all of our jobs, so much fun and so rewarding!  

The Stay and Play telephone number is 237-1154, email is stayandplayscpc@gmail.com and our website is: https://www.scpresby.org/stayandplay.html    We look forward to when we can have visitors again someday – however for now, no.  So if you have any questions or would like to offer a recorded reading of a book or science lesson, or anything(!), please call or email.

Thank you again for all you do to help Stay and Play Preschool have such a positive affect for so many in this community!

Laura Steager, Stay and Play Director