By Zack Anchors
Staff writer
    Next year, Colby Tirrell, a three-year-old who lives in West Scarborough, will be heading to preschool. Which preschool he will attend is still up in the air and his mother, Debbie, says there are not many options. After looking around, she found some preschools she thought would be great for Colby, but none of them had any openings available for fall of 2007.
“I’ve talked to other mothers that say they put their child on the waiting lists when they were six months old,” she said. “Colby is the first one on the list and we’re not sure if he’ll get in for 2007.”
The difficulty of getting Colby enrolled in a preschool was one of the factors that led Tirrell to start wondering why Scarborough does not have a cooperative preschool, like the one in Cumberland that her sister’s children attend.
“I think it’s been there for ten years or so,” said Tirrell of the Cumberland Community Nursery School. “A group of parents came together and in six months they had it going. My sister’s middle child has gone through it and she loved it and now her youngest is going through.”
Lately, Tirrell has been researching how cooperative preschools work and trying to find other parents who are interested in starting one.
“A cooperative preschool is comprised of parents who have formed a cooperative to provide quality care for their children,” said Tirrell. “As with all cooperatives, members contribute an initial membership fee towards the capitalization of the center and elect a board of directors on a one member/one vote basis.”
Tirrell, who moved to Scarborough three years ago, has been talking to parents at the playground and the library, trying to gauge how people feel about the idea. If she can find enough parents who are interested in the idea, Tirrell said the next step would be to begin looking for a possible location for the preschool and searching for a teacher to hire. 
“The teacher would set up the curriculum, but the board of directors set up the by-laws, deciding what should and shouldn’t be done at the preschool,” said Tirrell. “All the parents get to rotate in, taking turns being in the classroom.”
Besides giving the parents more of a role in the operations of the preschool, Tirrell said a cooperative preschool would be a lot less expensive too. While some of the preschools in Scarborough she has been looking at are around $225 a month, Tirrell said a cooperative preschool would probably cost $75 or $85 a month.
“It’s cost effective, the parents can be involved and it could be right in Scarborough,” she said. “But it would take some work to get going.”
    Tirrell said a cooperative preschool would need to be a certified non-profit organization and would need to also receive certification from the state as a licensed preschool. She said one of the biggest challenges would be finding the right location.
    “Location is key,” said Tirrell. “There could be a church or a business who would be willing to donate space or rent space.”
    The Cumberland Community Nursery School operates out of a Congregational church in Cumberland. Tirrell said it has about 12 students, which she thinks is about the right size for a cooperative with one teacher.
    “That place is a well run machine,” said Tirrell of the Cumberland preschool. “They’ve even got some savings.”
    Tirrell has a lot of ideas for how a cooperative preschool in Scarborough might function, but she said that ultimately it would be up to the various parents involved to decide how things would work.
    “I’m not sure what kind of teacher we’d be looking for – whether it would be someone just out of school or someone a little older and maybe retired. Obviously, we’d have to check out their background and make sure their the right person,” Tirrell said. “But that’s one of the things the parents would have to talk about.”
    Tirrell also would like to see the potential preschool have a well thought out curriculum that prepares children for entering kindergarten.
    “We’d want to have a set schedule, where they’re going to get used to what’s expected of them in kindergarten,” said Tirrell. “But it has to be fun.”
    Tirrell said in a cooperative preschool “a typical class will include parent supervised activity stations, a music time, snack time and an active time.”
    “They’ll have a project time where they need to finish a very simple task,” she said. “They might need to paste a piece of construction paper onto a paper plate that’s already cut into the shape of a turkey and then paste feathers on and color it in.”
    If Colby does not get into the preschool in Scarborough, Tirrell has considered sending him to a preschool in another town, maybe Gorham. But she said that she prefers Colby to be in preschool with children who he will be going to school with later and growing up with.
    “That’s one of the reasons I want to keep this in Scarborough,” she said. “So they’ll meet children they may go to school with.”
    If a group of parents got working on it this fall, Tirrell thinks a cooperative preschool could be up and running by fall of 2007.
    “Even if I did get Colby in a preschool, I’d still want to start a cooperative,” said Tirrell.
    She said she hopes other parents who are interested in the idea will contact her. Her email address is dtirrell@maine.rr.com.