Weekday preschool and Montessori ministries

Walk past a downtown Waco church on a Tuesday morning and the parking lot tells a different story than it does on Sunday. Minivans and compact cars cluster near a side door, not the sanctuary. Inside, the rooms that once held Sunday school classes now hold cots, easels, and low tables. The buildings have not changed their vocation; they have simply stretched it across the week.

A Weekday preschool ministry is the common name for this arrangement: a church opens its education wing to young children during the working week. The pattern is not unique to Waco, but the city's older congregations, with their long rows of classrooms built for Sunday attendance, are especially suited to it.

What a weekday preschool actually is

The plain definition is not complicated. A preschool is an educational establishment offering early childhood education to children before they begin compulsory schooling at primary level. It may be publicly or privately operated, and it may receive public subsidies. The typical age range in most countries runs from four to six years, moving a child toward kindergarten.

Terminology shifts from place to place. In the United States, "preschool" generally covers ages two to five and is often held in a nursery school, where readiness is judged developmentally, and potty training is a real factor in when a child can start. "Pre-K" covers four and five year olds. "Kindergarten" in the American sense covers five and six year olds. A church that advertises a weekday program may be using any of these labels for the same set of rooms.

Why the rooms were already there

Congregations built for a large Sunday attendance left a physical inheritance. The church building wings that date from the early and middle twentieth century were designed around classrooms, not offices. A downtown sanctuary might carry two floors of small rooms behind the main auditorium, each sized for a dozen children at most.

Those dimensions suit a preschool almost unchanged. Small rooms with low windows, cloakrooms, a kitchen, and a fenced yard are the standard kit of both a Sunday school and a nursery program. A congregation that keeps its building in use six days a week is also keeping the plumbing, heating, and insurance in working order, which is not a small consideration for a historic structure.

Room for both Sunday and Tuesday

The overlap is practical. The Sunday school wings that held children's classes on Sunday morning can be reset for weekday use with storage of cots, mats, and art supplies, then converted back before the weekend. A classroom built with child-height hooks and a washbasin serves a Sunday lesson and a Tuesday morning session without renovation.

That double use is the quiet argument for keeping church buildings that might otherwise close. A sanctuary used four hours a week struggles to justify its own maintenance. The same building with a weekday program inside it has a reason to stay open, insured, and heated.

When did this start in Waco?

The congregation program history of the city's downtown churches, and the wider Methodist record of the twentieth century, show the pattern emerging from the same decades as the buildings themselves. Some church programs name their founding dates; the record for others is incomplete, and the page does not publish every starting year. What is clear is that the weekday use of church buildings came after the Sunday use, not before it.

Nationally, the timeline is easier to trace. The first kindergarten in the United States was founded in Watertown, Wisconsin in 1856 and was conducted in German. Elizabeth Peabody opened America's first English-language kindergarten in 1860. The first free kindergarten in the country came in 1870 from Conrad Poppenhusen, a German industrialist and philanthropist, and the first publicly financed kindergarten followed in St. Louis in 1873 under Susan Blow.

The Canadian thread runs through a church as well. Canada's first private kindergarten was opened by the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island in 1870, and by the end of that decade such schools were common in large Canadian towns and cities. A Methodist congregation starting a kindergarten is not a Waco innovation; it is the denomination following its own habit.

What a Montessori program changes

Preschools do not all teach the same way. Among the methods adopted are Montessori, Waldorf, Head Start, HighScope, the Reggio Emilia approach, Bank Street, and Forest kindergartens. A church that houses a Montessori program is hosting a specific pedagogy, not a generic playgroup.

The academic argument behind these choices is old and unresolved. Much of the debate turns on how much academic content belongs in a preschool curriculum, and whether formal instruction or child-initiated exploration guided by adults works better. Supporters of an academic curriculum tend to favor basic skills, especially literacy and numeracy, with structured activities aimed at set goals.

Others defend a broad-based curriculum covering a child's overall development: health and physical development, emotional and spiritual wellbeing, social competence, intellectual development, and communication skills. A program run in a church building often arrives at that second description without trying, because the space itself, with its hall and yard and assembly room, does not lend itself to rows of desks.

Does preschool help?

The evidence runs in more than one direction. Researchers have found that the first three years of a child's life are critical for language acquisition, socialization, and attitudes toward learning, and that the brain grows most rapidly in the early years. Well-trained teachers and developmentally appropriate programs can have a long-term effect on learning outcomes, with the effects more marked for children from impoverished backgrounds who have had little access to healthy food, socialization, books, and play resources.

Other studies dispute the benefits. A study by UC Berkeley and Stanford University looking at 14,000 preschools found a temporary cognitive boost in pre-reading and math alongside detrimental effects on social development and cooperation. Research has also shown that the home environment has a greater impact on future outcomes than preschool does.

There is emerging evidence that high-quality preschools are play based rather than academically instructive. Peter Gray, a professor at Boston College and an expert on the evolution of play, argues that playing with other children away from adults is how children learn to make their own decisions, control their emotions and impulses, see from others' perspectives, negotiate differences, and make friends.

Meanwhile, the American Psychological Association reports that preschool attendees tend to score higher on cognitive and language assessments, and the Economic Policy Institute reports long-term economic benefits: higher earnings, increased tax revenues, and lower social costs. In 2022, 68 percent of four year olds in the United States attended preschool, with 32 percent not participating.

Where the handbells fit

Not every room in a church wing suits a four year old. The upper floors, the choir rooms, and the bell tower stairs are another kind of space entirely. Choirs and the Music of a congregation often occupy the same building on a weekday evening that a preschool occupies by day, and the two uses share more than a hallway. Both depend on a building that stays warm, lit, and open, and both give a congregation a reason to keep its doors unlocked past Sunday.

What the arrangement asks of a congregation

A weekday program brings obligations along with the income and the activity. Class size, student to teacher ratios, the quality of classroom environments, teacher to child interactions, and the alignment of standards, curriculum, and assessment are all matters that a program has to watch. Curriculum is designed for different ages; counting to ten, for instance, generally comes after the age of four.

A church considering the arrangement is deciding how much of its building it is willing to hand over on weekdays, and how much of its identity goes with it. The rooms will look different on a Tuesday than they did on a Sunday, and the congregation that returns on the weekend will find the evidence of it: a paint smock, a stack of mats, a name card taped to a door.

Anyone curious about how the city's congregations have handled that trade can walk the blocks around the downtown sanctuaries on a weekday morning and count the cars. The buildings are open. What happens inside them is a local decision made room by room.

The Waco Belfry editorial teamcontact@austinavenueumc.org

About the reference page: The Wikipedia article on preschool education describes an educational establishment offering early childhood education before compulsory primary school, covering terminology, origins, developmental areas, and curriculum. It traces the first American kindergarten to Watertown, Wisconsin in 1856, the first English-language kindergarten to Elizabeth Peabody in 1860, and Canada's first private kindergarten to the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Charlottetown in 1870. It also lists the teaching methods adopted by preschools, including Montessori, Waldorf, Head Start, HighScope, Reggio Emilia, Bank Street, and Forest kindergartens.