Inman Park Cooperative Preschool History

A group of Inman Park parents began Inman Park Cooperative Preschool in the basement of the Lizzie Bethel Baptist Church in the early 1980s, but the seed of the idea that became IPCP began to germinate in the 1960s and was nourished by the same community spirit working to better the neighborhood at the time.

In the late 1960s, when many of Inman Park’s stately mansions had become rooming houses or apartments and the neighborhood itself was being threatened by DOT plans for a new interstate, the Inman Park United Methodist Church started a group of programs to address the needs of the neighborhood, including a Mother’s Morning Out program and a “Mother’s Club,” which met each week.

A Inman Park United Methodist Church member drove through the neighborhood daily, offering families free bread, rent and utilities assistance and transportation to the church’s programs for children. According to early IPCP parent and neighborhood resident Diane Floyd, around 1971 “something different started to happen when the church member would knock on doors in Inman Park. She knocked on a door on Spruce Street and they didn’t need bread or monetary assistance but they did need the Mother’s Morning Out program for their two- and three-year-old girls.”

Throughout the 1970s, more early Inman Park pioneers used this program and were teachers themselves. Later, the program’s leadership shifted increasingly to parents using the program and it evolved to a more formal preschool. In 1981, parents decided to move out of the Inman Park United Methodist Church space because of concerns about asbestos. Summer camp that year was held in a neighbor’s backyard, and that August the school moved into the basement of the Lizzie Chapel Baptist Church on Euclid Avenue.

That same year, the name of the program was changed to the Inman Park Cooperative Preschool. There was no debate over calling it a cooperative, because doing so fit the “mindset of the neighborhood.” According to long-time resident Floyd, everyone was working together to renovate their houses so it was natural for everyone to work together for their children’s education as well. In addition, the cooperative structure was desirable for financial reasons. Parents were working hard to rejuvenate their houses and neighborhood themselves and could save money by contributing time and effort to the school instead of dollars. Interestingly, little has changed about the basic structure of the school since that time: From the very beginning, parents participated through parent teacher days, work days and committee involvement.

However, some things have changed. In the Lizzie Chapel days, Diane says the school was often “struggling for kids.” There were some years when members wondered whether there were would be enough children to fill the classes and keep the school going. Eight years after moving to Lizzie Chapel, the school moved again, into the current building at the corner of Edgewood Avenue and Waddell Street.

Annual Auction A Reunion for Inman Park Cooperative Preschool

Each year on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, Inman Park Cooperative Preschool holds an event that’s part party, part fundraiser, part reunion, part shopping experience and an intown Atlanta tradition when it opens the doors of the Inman Park Trolley Barn at noon for its annual Holiday Sale and Auction.

2006 marks the twenty-second anniversary of IPCP’s annual auction, which has gone from being a tiny affair raising 3,000.00 hard-earned dollars in 1984 to this year’s gala event. That the preschool is even able to commemorate the anniversary of that first auction is due to the enthusiasm and hard work of its present-day and alumni parents and friends. Though the children who attended Inman Park Cooperative Preschool in its earliest years are now in their twenties, the auction creates a certain sense of continuity for the school as new parents follow in the footsteps of those early volunteers who “lived and breathed” the event.

Inman Park resident John Sweet, whose two sons, now 25 and 21, both attended the preschool, not only served as auctioneer for the first auction and its most recent one, but for “maybe ten auctions” altogether. “For years I’ve known a lot of people in the audience,” he says. “It gets to be a lot of fun. It’s very intense, like going to a big party.” He adds, “I never really know what I’m going to say, but Inman Park Cooperative Preschool always forgives me. I’d pay the school to be able to auctioneer, but they haven’t figured that out.”

On a more serious note, Sweet emphasizes that the annual auction is one of the ways parents build their school. “It’s a training ground for parents. It’s because of the preschool that we have a stronger Mary Lin, a stronger Inman, a stronger Grady. A lot of Grady parents got their start at the preschool. The auction is part of people taking responsibility for their school.”

Almost every family who has had children at the preschool over the years has a story to share of items they purchased at the auction that have acquired a place in their family lore. “I remember one year, my parents purchased a huge Chinese embroidery for only $20.00 — no one else bid on it — that they later had elaborately framed,” remembers preschool alumni parent Ann Van Slyke. “It’s now one of their most prized possessions. It stretches the length of their sofa and everyone walks in and says ‘ahhh’ when they see it and has to hear the story.”

Admission to the IPCP Annual Holiday Sale and Auction is FREE. Auction proceeds support the preschool by providing books, toys and educational materials, maintaining the school’s award-winning greenspace and supporting scholarship programs.

A Historical Prospective on Cooperative Preschools

(written by Betty Wood, IPCP Director, Spring 2004 Coop Scoop)

Philosophical Underpinnings of Cooperative Education

Belief in the natural rights of the child and the responsibility of parents to ensure a proper education is interwoven throughout the history of the evolution of cooperative preschools. The humanistic developmental model cooperative preschools traditionally follow draws on the early education philosophies of reformers and philosophers such as Jan Comenius, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi.

As early as 1628 educational reformer Comenius emphasized teaching children under the age of six the basic foundations of learning through structured play. Comenius believed that early childhood education was so critical to a child’s preparation for higher learning that he proposed that teachers of pre-school age children should be better educated and earn higher salaries than those of older children. According to Rousseau, the author of Emile (1762), a child’s education began at birth. The adult’s role in the child’s life was to facilitate the learning process in response to the child’s own interest in the natural world. Like Rousseau, Swiss schoolmaster Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi viewed education as the gradual unfolding of the child’s innate ability. Parents and teachers were instructed to encourage children to discover their unique abilities through observation and investigation of nature. Outdoor explorations were incorporated into the daily curriculum and brought indoors for further exploration.

Early Utopian Communities Establish Cooperative “Play Schools”

Two of the earliest models for cooperative preschools in the U.S. emerged from Utopian communities that established play schools to care for children while parents worked. Robert Owen’s Village of New Harmony, Indiana (founded 1826) emphasized teaching children to be socially cooperative in their play while becoming independent thinkers responsible for their own actions. Brook Farm, founded in Boston, Massachusetts in 1841, provided a cooperative preschool for its children where both fathers and mothers rotated the responsibility for assisting the preschool teacher in the classroom.

In the mid-nineteeth century, German immigrants began to introduce Pestalozzi-influenced educational philosophies into the American educational system through Freidrich Froebel’s German kindergarten movement. As the century progressed, educators William and Eudora Hailmann continued to incorporate German teaching theories through educational philosophies centered on the child’s natural ability to learn through play in the classroom, on the playground and in the garden. The teacher’s role was to facilitate learning through self-realization and self-control, preparing children for becoming well-balanced adults. The curriculum consciously excluded reading, writing and ciphering. Mothers and older sisters were expected to work in the classroom with the teachers and parent participation was valued. The Hailmanns believed that just as children need a circle of friends in kindergarten, so do mothers as they learn to work with teachers in the joint education of their children.

The “Angel in the House” Steps into the Public Arena

As the mother’s role in education became more recognized, mothers gained confidence in their ability to influence the course of their children’s education. In 1897, mothers organized to found the Congress of Mothers, which became known as the Parent Teachers Association in 1924. By the end of the nineteenth century, the fields of education, psychology, pediatrics and health were becoming more organized into professional associations with an emphasis on the welfare of the child. Increasing numbers of middle-class, educated families came to recognize kindergarten as a socially-accepted institution providing mothers an opportunity to extend their domestic roles to the community by volunteering to assist teachers in the classroom and through organizing and raising funds for the good of the children in schools.

The first schools in the U.S. to identify themselves as cooperative preschools were established in 1915. A neighborhood community in Pasadena, California founded Northside Cooperative Nursery School, and faculty wives at the University of Chicago founded The Chicago Cooperative Nursery School. In both schools, parents maintained the buildings and grounds, elected a Board, participated in the classrooms one day each week and met for parent education classes one afternoon each week. As the Chicago cooperative developed, University of Chicago education and home economics students worked as interns and the cooperative emerged into a laboratory school serving the university community. By 1943, 28 additional cooperative preschools had been founded in states ranging from Arkansas to Washington.

As the number of cooperative preschools grew in the 1950s and 1960s, independent cooperatives formed councils to share information and to provide professional support. The Montgomery County, Maryland Council of Cooperative Nursery Schools was established in 1943. In 1948, the California Council of Cooperative Nursery Schools was established. By 1960, there were more than 1000 cooperative preschools in the United States and that same year, the American Council for Parent Cooperatives was established. By 1964, Canada and New Zealand were part of the Council and its name had been changed to Parent Cooperative Preschools International.

Social Currents Continue to Affect Parenting Roles

The years between World War I and World War II brought significant changes to families in the U.S. During both wars, women joined the workforce or continued their education, depending upon extended family or neighborhood women for assistance in the care and education of their children. Gender role expectations began to shift. In 1920, the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote. By 1930, less than half of the United States population lived on farms with extended families. The public became increasingly informed in the theories of parenting and education, as names such as Freud, Watson, Gesell and Erickson were prominently featured in articles in Parents Magazine.

The Baby Boom Hastens Change

The period following World War II held the promise of a bright future for families. Veterans attended college on the GI Bill and purchased homes with low interest GI mortgages. Birth rates increased and families migrated to the suburbs. New and better appliances replaced routine household chores. Women who worked outside the home out of necessity during the Depression and during wartime out of patriotic duty lost their jobs within months of the end of World War II. Popular pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock advocated permissive parenting practices based on the needs of the child. Such rapid changes in the family structure and in women’s roles left many mothers and wives feeling displaced, inadequate and incompetent. Parent cooperative preschools provided a social support network that met familial, personal and professional needs. Women who participated in cooperative preschools increased their parenting skills and acquired new ones as they chaired committees and organized fundraising events. As fathers and mothers worked together for the benefit of their children in parent cooperative preschools, gender role expectations in parenting underwent significant changes. Fathers learned to become nurturers and educators of their children under the guidance of the teachers and other parents in the community. Mothers became organizers and policymakers through committee responsibilities and service on boards of directors.

The tumultuous 1960s and social response to the Vietnam War further influenced the social perception of gender role expectations and family structure. Many families chose unconventional family structures, paving the way for the demands placed on young families in the latter part of the twentieth century.

As the twenty-first century dawns, families enjoy the freedom of structuring themselves to meet their own financial and parenting needs. Cooperative preschools meet the needs of families who want to actively participate in the nurturance and education of their children while pursuing their careers. Today, flextime for both parents and social recognition of either parent’s choice to stay at home while children are young lend themselves to parent participation in cooperatives, where both parents and children develop social values and skills which contribute to a life-long commitment to community responsibility.

IPCP One of Only Two Cooperative Preschools in Georgia

Today, there are more than 1000 cooperative preschools in the United States and Canada, with the greatest number located on the West Coast. Inman Park Cooperative Preschool, formally established in 1981, and Grant Park Cooperative Preschool, established in 2000, are the only cooperative preschools in Georgia. Long waiting lists at both schools are evidence of the increased demand for and popularity of cooperative preschools in the Atlanta area.

(Statistical information and historical facts are based on accounts from “It’s the Camaraderie,” A History of Parent Cooperative Preschools, Dorothy Hewes, Center for Cooperatives, University of California, Davis, California, 1998.)