Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/mission-organization-how-one-program-tackled-their-parent-handbook-and-won/5017868/
Early care and education center directors have a whole host of reasons for printing comprehensive and informative parent handbooks. The parents of the children who attend our early care and education centers have their own set of expectations and needs for information contained in parent handbooks. When these sets of needs and expectations collide, it just might happen that the parent handbook goes unread. At least this has been my experience. When I saw this happening, I set out to write a handbook that parents would read!Directors’ perspective on parent handbooks
Early childhood directors rely enormously on handbooks. If the handbooks that other directors create are anything like mine, they are evolutionary entities. Let me describe this evolutionary process, like the wise Winnie the Pooh does, by “beginning at the beginning.”
When our center first opened, our parent handbook contained approximately 30 topics. These were required by our day care licensing body (“At the time of a child’s enrollment, the parent must be provided with written notification of…”). Information and center policies on the following topics were included:
• ages and numbers of children served
• days and hours of operation
• health, immunization, and ill children
• parent conferences and parent visitors
• children’s ...