"...we need to start thinking that education can take place
in many places other than the four walls of the public schools."

The Principal:
								One thing that we’ve learned is that it takes a lot more time than you think. It takes a lot of people saying ‘We can’t do this/Why not?’. It also takes a lot of trust building so that you’re open to hearing issues from both sides. When you get a team whose main focus is the children, it really takes away a lot of the politics.

Deb Suchla:
								Taking your time and talking with your community as you go along in the process really worked well for us in this effort. We took our time and talked about the basics of our program: What is our vision? What are our goals? What things do we believe in? We took a lot of time doing that as well as laying a lot of important ground work, created a lot of trust, and then we took it out to the community. Every time we came to a new level of planning, we would take it out to the community. When we had the commmunity understanding what we were doing, there were no suprises. This built a lot of trust and faith in what we were doing.

The Principal:
								We’ve been able to start providing more choices for families. We recently did a survey of the families of the three hundred and four children in the preschool program in the LaCrosse area. What we found was that at about half of the families would not have enrolled their children in preschool, had the district not started this collaborative initiation.

A Parent:
								Without this four-year-old program that we’re currently enrolled in, we would have only been financially able to send him for three days, but now we can send him for five. There’s also an extended day program at the preschool that we pay for, which will help him adjust to a ‘typical’ school setting for kindergarten next year.

Deb Suchla:
								There are options where the children can attend child care, options to attend a school site, length of care, beginning and ending sites… so a family can pick what’s best for them.

The Principal:
								I don’t think I would have said this a year ago, but I think our future is to provide more of what we call our model twos and threes. I think that families want to lessen transitions for their children and that we need to start thinking that education can take place in many places other than the four walls of the public schools.

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