My daycare planned on dc opening up ratios by now, but they haven’t. There’s not room to move my kids up.

Also, what kind of daycare is it? Some like mixed-age rooms because of their philosophy. Mixed-age is particularly big in Montessori because part of their approach is to empower kids to teach each other -- they feel the little ones benefit from seeing older kids doing thing they are still learning, and the older kids benefit from learning to deal with the limitations of younger kids and to be able to teach and show them things.

In my experience, daycare demand is the highest for the youngest infant rooms and usually decreases with age as more childcare options become available to parents. So at our daycare, they are always motivated to move kids up, because the wait list for infants is the longest, then toddlers, then preschoolers, then K. I haven't seen COVID change that.

Anonymous wrote:After 2-2.5, a lot of preschools put kids on a schedule where they change rooms in the fall to accommodate pre-k leaving for kindergarten.

Once my oldest kid was in the toddler room, all subsequent transitions were tied to the school year. My younger son is in a 3’s classroom until the end of August, but he has been 4 since October.

Ah that makes sense, thank you!

We're heading this in our daycare too, OP. People redshirting kids because of uncertainty around whether there will be real FT K/school in the fall and that K classes will be huge due to redshirting from the previous year due to closed schools.

A few options:
- There isn't space for older kids to move up because people needed FT care and schools were closed
- Transitioning at the fall as PP mentioned.
- Maybe they don't have demand at the toddler level compared to the preschool level, and the want to continue to charge people toddler care prices without having to actually meet toddler licensing ratios. (This might be a stretch, I don't know).

Our daycare is in DC (we're in MD), so it's normal to have kids leave at 3 or 4, but basically no one has done that this past year because of the lack of in person schooling. Normally her class would be mostly 3s and a few 4s and MAYBE one 5 year old from Maryland, but now it's 3s but also a lot of 4s with a few 5s.

It worked out great for us, though, since we were debating whether to move her from a daycare she like a lot so she'd have more same age peers, but we didn't have to make that choice.

After 2-2.5, a lot of preschools put kids on a schedule where they change rooms in the fall to accommodate pre-k leaving for kindergarten.

Once my oldest kid was in the toddler room, all subsequent transitions were tied to the school year. My younger son is in a 3’s classroom until the end of August, but he has been 4 since October.

more likely because their parents need FT care and schools are closed.

It feels like there are a lot of older kids in my DD's 2s room. A good group of them must have already turned 3. I'm curious if this might be to deal with parents keeping their 5 year olds in daycare this year?