A new day care is preparing to open in Reston.
A franchise for Celebree School, which features digital reports for each child daily and helps prepare kids for kindergarten, is slated to open at a low-rise office building at 11109 Sunset Hills Road, Unit 150 near Wiehle Avenue.
“We researched different schools and it was a no-brainer that Celebree was the right choice for us,” franchisee Josephine Kibe-Johnson said in an email.
The schools’ curriculum strives to incorporate not just academic needs but emotional, physical and social factors, too. It’ll serve infants, toddlers, preschoolers and school-age children.
“We were amazed with the creative curriculum that is followed at Celebree that offers tailored lessons to meet the unique needs of children; curriculum that is comprehensive, based on research and [provides] developmentally appropriate content for children with different skills and [backgrounds],” Kibe-Johnson also wrote.
The business is currently looking to hire a director and an assistant director and teachers for the school’s different age groups.
It comes as childcare challenges during the pandemic caused centers to close and left many looking to fill positions and retain workers.
According to a survey by the National Association for the Education of Young Children, which surveyed providers in the industry in part of June and July, more than one in every three respondents said they were considering “leaving or shutting down their child care programs this year, and over half of minority-owned programs are reckoning with the possibility of permanent closure.”
In Virginia, many day cares reported having staffing shortages, serving fewer children, having a longer waitlist than usual and having reduced their operating hours, the association’s survey found.
Federal COVID-19 relief money has gone to governments, parents and child care centers, and Fairfax County aid has sought to use its portion of that money to keep day cares open. County staff noted in July that child care programs could close at a time when more parents are returning to work.
For Kibe-Johnson, she said her business could be part of helping address a shortage in childcare services.
“We believe that we are part of the solution of helping parents, especially women, go back to work, by providing quality childcare services for their children,” she wrote.
A groundbreaking event at the proposed location is slated for 11 a.m. this Tuesday (Nov. 9), where community members are able to attend for refreshments, activities and more.
The day care is projected to open in the first quarter of 2022.
Photo via Google Maps
A new day care is coming to Reston that will teach kids how to read music, play instruments, and sing.
Cascades resident Tony Wininger is launching a Rock and Roll Daycare at 1835 Alexander Bell Drive, nestled between Sunrise Valley Drive and the Dulles Toll Road.
“The focus is music,” he told Reston Now.
Wininger’s interest in running the day care, which is looking to open on Sept. 27, was inspired by his 20-year-old daughter Madison, who is on the autism spectrum.
When she was 3 or 4, he decided to learn guitar after a developmental pediatrician told him she wouldn’t be able to speak. He thought that couldn’t be true, and he saw his daughter prove the doctor wrong.
The day care will serve kids up to age 6 with music lessons twice a day, both group and individual sessions.
Kids will learn songs to sing and how to play instruments ranging from drums and musical bells to keyboards and guitars. Students can even take some of the smaller instruments home with them, along with accompanying music books.
Research on the childhood development benefits of learning music has been mixed. Some studies question the existence of a connection, while others show positive effects on the social skills of kids as young as 1 and suggest learning music may encourage faster neurodevelopment than other activities.
For Wininger, seeing his own daughters grow and be influenced by music illustrated how perceptive kids can be. His younger daughter, Hope, showed off her drumming skills at age 5, and when Madison was younger, she could only speak a few words, but now, she can’t stop talking and singing.
One of the goals of the Rock and Roll Daycare program is for children to be able to read music fluently. Unique to Wininger’s locations will be a multicultural program where kids learn to sing songs from different countries each month in the original languages.
“I want this to be the…’it takes a village’ feel,” he said of the Reston day care, which features a main room, six enclosed rooms, restrooms, and an office.
The day care is one of 30 sites that Wininger expects to get licensed by the state. Other locations coming in the near future could include Arlington and Alexandria.
Rock and Roll Daycare was started in 2012 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by two musicians and is now moving to expand across the country with upcoming sites in New York, Indiana, and Texas, along with Wininger’s Virginia locations.
Wininger plans to limit electronic devices in his day cares to what is needed for staff. He also doesn’t want his locations to be limited by the day care environment.
He envisions additional programming, from concerts to date nights for parents, and wants to make use of his drumming and guitar skills for the day care and additional outreach. The kid-focused band Rocknoceros from Fairfax will perform at the Reston site on Sept. 28.
The cost per child will be $2,400 per month, which is higher than usual to retain staff, Wininger says, noting that candidates with education and musical experience are gravitating toward the openings. The day care is planning to hire two employees for every eight kids.
“We’re Montessori-inspired by the way we teach education,” Wininger said.
