A good co-op and a good plain-nursery-school will have very similar goals.  They will both work toward rounded social and emotional and physical and intellectual development.  I believe that co-op children do get some special breaks – we’ll talk about them later.

       A co-op is your school as much as it is your child’s school.  You work in it.  You give your energy and your ideas.  You put yourself into the school.  You help to shape it and to make it whatever it becomes.  Today, in so many parts of our lives, something vague and faraway seems always to run the show:  “the establishment”, the bosses, City Hall…  Many of us don’t feel we have much of a role to play.  Not so in a co-op.  The very opposite, in fact.  A co-op is parents PLUS the well-trained teacher.  There is no “George”; no one else to do the work, no one else to blame.  Parents who choose co-ops find this full involvement welcome. 

       The cooperative nursery school offers the adults benefits.  One frequent outcome is that parents find new friends for themselves at school.  Sharing the joys as well as the headaches and backaches of making a co-op a good school brings adults very close together.  In today’s impersonal, everyone-for-himself world, such close human associations are rare.  Co-op parents relish them.  

     Co-op parents also obligate themselves to a special relationship with the trained nursery school teacher, the professional director.  This is a delicate and unusual relationship.  In a co-op, parents play a key part but no school can be great without strong trained leadership.  In a co-op, professional leadership is essential but no co-op can be great without the full utilization of the talents and insights of parents.  Co-ops call for a rare mixture of mutual trust and respect among adults of differing backgrounds. 

     Now a word about the special gains co-op children make.  There are at least two I’m aware of.  Number one:  Co-ops usually have more adults present than do standard nursery schools, with the trained teacher on hand, plus several parent-assistants.  The extra hands and minds can mean greater richness and variety in the co-op program; they can mean the chance for more attention and more help for individual children.  These are real virtues, not to be sneezed at. 

      Gain number two:  In a co-op, “school” doesn’t end at twelve o’clock, nor does it end on Friday.  A co-op child is apt to be surrounded by a common point of view twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week.  The child is apt to get more consistency in guidance and more richness in stimulation, home and school and school and home. 

    “Why a co-op?”  I think they would say that a cooperative nursery school is one way of getting a good nursery education for your child and an amazing way of getting some very pleasing experiences for yourself!  Having been a part of a co-op, I would go along with them.  But you have to decide if a co-op fits your life.  If it does, you are lucky, and I think you will be very pleased.

Excerpts from Notes for Parents, “But Why a Co-Op?” by James Hymes, Ed.D., Hacienda Press, Carmel, CA                   Publicity/co-op