Welcome to Redmond Parent Cooperative Preschool

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We are permanently closed. 

Thank you to all our families who have attended through the years. 

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End of an Era, farewell Miss Julie, Miss Talia and RPCP

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Dear Redmond Parent Cooperative Preschool Community and Alumni,

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I want to thank you all for the amazing community you helped to create and maintain over so many decades. As the subject suggests, this message brings some difficult news as well as reasons to celebrate. Our board has made the very difficult decision to close RPCP as we know it at the end of this school year. This decision was difficult for us on some level, because we will all grieve the end of an era, but it is also a reason to celebrate the legacy we will be passing on through the community and friendships we have created as well as the foundational imprint Redmond Parent Cooperative Preschool has had for so many of our children.

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Of course, we would not be the community we are without our amazing teachers. One big reason for our decision is Miss Julie’s decision to retire at the end of this year. Julie has been teaching at RPCP for 28 years and over that span, has taught multiple generations of preschoolers in her career. We really couldn’t imagine what the school would be like without Julie. Her retirement coupled with our teacher Talia’s coincidental resignation at the end of the school year (to spend more time with her busy family), really forced us to evaluate our resources and how we could best serve the co-op community. The drop in enrollment due to the Pandemic caused our reserves to take a major hit. While we had very healthy reserves going into the Pandemic, the limit on class sizes, overall decrease in enrollment numbers and inability to raise tuition due to economic circumstances resulted in us operating in a deficit the past 2 years, relying heavily on our reserves to get us through these crazy times. It would take a significant injection in finances and volunteer resources to get back to a point where the school could realistically thrive.

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Finding the right teacher in these times (in less than 3 months) is also a near-impossible feat with the limited means, limited workforce, and the currently very slim volunteer board of directors, most of us who have children aging out of the preschool. Like many of you, we are fatigued, overworked and lack the resources it would honestly take to keep the school open. But we also recognize that you have put your trust in us to do what is in the best interest of our community as a whole. Rather than continue against the odds and drain the last penny from our accounts, we would like to use our remaining assets and resources to help out other cooperative schools under the Lake Washington Institute of Technology umbrella. This Spring, we will be having a liquidation sale with special access to our alumni communities, so that you can find a special treasure to commemorate your time at RPCP—details will be forthcoming.

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For those of you who have little ones needing to find a preschool program and who had hoped to return to RPCP, we can highly recommend our sister preschool, Kirkland Cooperative Preschool. It is also under the same LWIT umbrella, geographically close, with access to much of the same parenting education, similar cooperative community feeling and amazing teachers that we all loved so much about RPCP. Registration for the Fall is currently open, so check them out if you’re interested: http://www.kirklandcoop.com/

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Last but not least, you can be sure that we will be including all of you in our end of an era celebration--Miss Julie’s retirement, Talia’s moving on, and a chance to gather and acknowledge that while the doors may be closing, the community we have is still alive and strong. It’s been a hard two years and we have so many reasons to celebrate. Thank you all again for making this community so amazing. I will forever treasure my memories, my children's preschool creations and most of all, my lifelong friendships forged at RPCP.

 

With Tears and Gratitude,

 

Stacy Bowker (on behalf of the Board of Directors)