What's Unique about Allen Creek?
Our Model
The experience of Allen Creek Preschool for children, families, staff, and our community is based upon a carefully thought out, researched, and articulated model of child development that focuses on the whole child within the family. In this modern psychoanalytic model, we strive to understand each child as an individual.
- We are thoughtful with the children and their parents about the meanings of their behavior.
- We respect and support their inner selves as they grow from tiny babies into schoolchildren who are sturdy, resilient, and ready to enjoy all kinds of learning.
- Our highly trained, experienced, and renowned interdisciplinary staff of teachers, administrators, and mental health professionals work closely together with parents to support them in these important early childhood years.
- We are thoughtful about creating a safe, predictable, and aesthetically pleasing environment that is enriching and expanding for children to support their emotional, intellectual, physical, and social growth without being over stimulating.
- Our work with children, families, and the larger community is relationship-based, as we believe that strong relationships provide the best context for sturdy development.
- It is important to us that our in-house programs represent a diverse population, and we strive to support each family’s development within the values they set out for themselves.
Intentional Parenting©
Ours is an active stance toward parenting, empowering parents to be the kinds of parents they want to be.
- We help parents articulate their own values in child rearing and move toward actualizing these values, so they can develop a sense of agency and joy in raising their children. We do this in daily informal contacts between parents and teachers, in school-wide activities like Family Art Nights and Community Meals, and through our Family Consultant Program.
- Parents meet two evenings each month with the other parents of children in their classroom and with two Family Consultants for facilitated and informed discussion of child development questions and issues.
- Another forum we have for supporting “Intentional Parenting” is a series of evening discussions open to the public in which various topics of child development are thought about across different ages.
Our Community
Allen Creek Preschool is a community. Parents involve themselves in our school in both receiving and giving ways. Parents support what goes on in their children’s classrooms, think with us and each other about parenting, and volunteer in small and larger ways, serving on the Allen Creek Parent Council and other committees. All of us—children, parents, staff, volunteers—learn about ourselves and each other at Allen Creek in challenging and enriching ways.
Our staff, children, parents, and alumni form a support system for each other and for others beyond our immediate community that extends significantly beyond our school day. We are there for each other 24/7. We take pride in the long-standing relationships that develop among our families while they are at Allen Creek and into the future. We foster lasting ties to our alumni families, so that they can reach out to us in times of need and so that we can call upon their diverse resources to support our school.
In the broader regional and state early childhood education community, Allen Creek has outreach programs providing educational services, trainings, and consultation to other schools and organizations. (Early Childhood Training Initiative) Allen Creek participates in many local and state task forces to develop services for children.
Our International Context
Allen Creek Preschool is a founding member of the Association for Psychoanalytic Schools (APS), a non-profit consortium of schools around the country and abroad sharing our philosophy and model. We are accredited by the APS. It is exciting to mentor new schools with significant parent involvement, applying this broad and deep understanding of child development to educational settings. Allen Creek Preschool has won two national awards for our innovative approach to excellence in preschool education.
