Tell me about before/ after school, summer programs/ nursey schools in your area and why you love them ( or what you wish they would be).
I adore my DD's day camp. It's run by the community education branch of our local junior college (which is the largest 2-year college in the state). It's an educational camp, but they have a huge range of classes. Art, music, dance, foreign language, sports, math, reading, science, computers, gardening. DD gets to pick up to 4 classes, and does those for a week (camp is Mon-Thur, which is the only bad thing - I'd prefer 5-day-a-week camp), then has 4 new classes for the next week. In each of those 4 weekly-class periods, she has 3 classes to choose from. They don't have a pool or any water activities, which works fine for us.
You can drop/add week-by-week, with a full refund for the coming week as long as you drop by the Wednesday before. You can enroll, change schedules, and pay online. You can bring your own lunch, or buy lunch. They also do before / after care that runs the hours out to 7:30-5:30, but I think that's a more bare-bones offering. It's completely flexible in the number of classes you take in a week, so if you just need a morning or afternoon program, that works.
The staff are all college students supervised by university employees, and the teachers are a mix of college students, faculty, and folks from the community who work with kids. DD did a karate class last year, taught by someone from a local karate studio. DD goes to a very undiverse public school: she was the only non-white kid in her kindergarten class, and there are zero male teachers in her pre-K-to-5th-grade building. Camp is about 50% non-white kids (a lot of the campers are children of the college's international students) and maybe 30% non-white staff, and has multiple male staff and teachers. It's small enough that whichever staff person helps her out of the car and into her group at drop-off knows her by name, and DD adores them, and is always hugging on them. DD is also not a kid who usually handles transitions well, and she doesn't mind changing classes during the day or doing new classes from week to week, and has a new BFF who has a lot of classes with her virtually every week.
This year, they've added "bridge" camps (for kids who want to work on their academic skills to be ready for the next school year), and for the older kids, they have all sorts of full-day, subject-specific programs. So you could do a week of math camp, and a week of entrepreneurship camp, and a week of medical careers camp, for instance.
They have access to virtually all of the college facilities - the computer labs, the library, the student health center (where I had to pick DD up one day after she threw up). But they're also under constant supervision, and the locations the kids are at aren't publicized (and it's a good-sized campus, so you couldn't just wander around and find them) - if you need a kid mid-day, you report to a central location, and they find your kid and bring them to you.
Camp is also relatively cheap ($132 a week for Mon-Thur 9am-4:30pm), and 10 minutes from my not-close-to-anything work.
