COMMUNITY STAFF

PRIMARY CARE

Each child is assigned a primary care provider - a single teacher who is primarily focused on that child. Providing primary care allows children to build trust and bond more easily with their teachers. While both teachers in a classroom will be aware of and able to meet your child’s needs at any time, knowing that your child has one person at school who is particularly familiar with and tuned into his or her needs provides you with added security and ease of communication.

In the classroom, ChildRoots provides children in our three age groups with an exceptional teacher to student ratio. In our infant cohorts, the ratio is four students to one staff member, with our toddler cohorts having a ratio of five students per teacher. Our preschool cohorts, which see our largest overall enrollment, have a student-teacher ratio of 10:1.

Our primary teachers help design the learning experiences that are at the core of our project-based curriculum. The curriculum is designed based on the interests of the cohorts, with teachers acting as guides throughout the process. The process is the main focus of these projects, as teachers guide and collaborate with children, allowing them to learn and explore individually or in groups.    

SUPPORT STAFF

In addition to primary teachers, each classroom has a team of support staff.

The break support teachers guarantee that each primary teacher gets to leave the classroom for breaks, one-hour lunches, and provide extra support.

Substitute teachers also play an important role at our school. When teachers take vacations or need a day off due to illness, our school employs well-trained substitutes who are available to fill in as needed.

BUILDING CONFIDENCE IN INFANTS

In our infant rooms, we are generally inspired by the work of Magda Gerber and her Resources for Infant Educarers (RIE). This means that we respect babies as people, value even the youngest baby as a competent individual and speak to and treat them as we would older children or adults. Since it is always our goal to allow children the time and space for self-discovery and self-learning, we allow infants to develop mobility and other skills at their own pace, never propping them or placing them in a position into which they cannot naturally move their bodies.