"... just seeing Daniel in that environment made me realize
that that was the right environment for him."

The Principal:
								Hi, my name is Jane Morken and I’m the principal at Northwoods Elementary in LaCrosse, Wisconsin. This past summer I was given the added position of Early Childhood Supervisor, so I’m sure you can imagine what a quick learning curve that was for me. I was somewhat prepared for it because for the last three years, I have been working as part of a team that’s been trying to implement four-year-old programming for the school district of LaCrosse. As a matter of fact, I was part of the first team that failed. I was one of eleven elementary principals that went to the school board and said ‘Hey, let’s start preschool, let’s put it in our schools…’ and they said ‘No, we’ve go to think about the community’. Learning a lot from that experience, I became part of the community collaboration commitees which is responsible for the models that we have today.

Deb Suchla:
								My name’s Deb Suchla. We got together as a collaboration after several community efforts. This was a unique time because the school district had tried a model on their own and it wasn’t passed by the school board, so we knew we had to make an effort to have the community and the schools working together for four-year-olds.

A Parent:
								I really prefer Montessori schools. I didn’t know much about it in the preschool setting, but just seeing Daniel in that environment made me realize that that was the right environment for him. I understand that it’s not necessarily the right environment for every child, but it’s right for him. He is there for two and a half hours a day for five days a week. I started him out at three days a week at a different preschool last year and by the end of the third day, he would want to stay home. This concerned me because I thought it might have been too much for him. When we started this year, after the first three days, I asked him if he would want to go for a full week and he said he wanted to go for six days.

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