Thank you so much for the great responses! I have decided to go with the regular program.

PP did a beautiful job summarizing.

We didn't do Educare for most of the reasons she gave. MOST of the time we don't ever need more than 30 hours either. Sometimes not even that. (My kids are 10 and 11)

But sometimes we do need it, and it has been at times I never expected. Having all that flexibility built in is great.

Yes, we hosted an Educare one year. We got very lucky and had an excellent young woman from Germany. Here is why I would not host an Educare again:

1) the Educare program is "sold" as a study abroad time with a little childcare thrown in, and families pay an additional $500 for college courses. Unless your Educare is very resourceful (ours was) and unless you're willing to pay well above $1000 (we were), she will not find courses to take to satisfy 12 credits for even a little over 1000. Fortunately, our Educare wanted art classes, MCCC had plenty, and we paid in-county tuition, but if those all don't fit your scenario, then good luck. Our AP now wants education credits, and we can't find any for less than $300 each credit (so, well above the $500 stipend per AP).

2) Most au pairs work only 30 hours/week, and your Educare will learn this quickly. She will also learn that she is making $50 less per week than they are to work the same schedule. This can lead to a lot of resentment (it didn'T with our Educare because we gave her six weeks off for travel and hosting friends, but it did with her other Educare friends)

3) There will invariably be a week, unforeseeable now, that you will need more than 30 hours, and that is against the rules. Our daughter got sick twice in the year - pneumonia once and flu once - and there went the 30 hours , gone by the end of WEdnesday. Add in a few snow days, and the winter was very tough with using every second of the 30 hours. Even though our regular schedule doesn't come close to 30 hours, it is nice to have the extra cushion up to 45 on the occasional weeks we need hours.

4) Educares come to the US thinking they are here to study not to take care of children. But 30 hours is still a LONG time to be with children. We did not find that most of the educares we interviewed had any concept of what 30 hours actually looked and felt like. Few had any real childcare experience at all or any concept of what a 5-6 hour/day job felt like.

5) The Educare program was not any less expensive, in lived form, than the au pair program. You're still paying the agency, still paying the perks, still paying the room and board, etc. The only one making a small bit less is the AP, and again, this will lead to resentment when she realizes that her friends all work her same schedule but make $50 week more.

There is a lot more info on this on aupairmom, and I suggest you do a search for it. Someone actually ran the numbers there to show how you don't save money. But to me, it's less about the money than about the program itself...I don't think it's a fair one to either the families or the APs because the educares come thinking they can take 12 meaningful credits for 1000, and they can't. So it ends up being on the HF to pay extra or on the AP to take classes that aren't meaningful to her but are cheap and therefore simply fulfill her requirement.

Has anyone had an au pair on the reduced hours schedule (30/wk)? We don't think we would ever need more than 30 hours a week of child care, so we thought we might try to find someone from APIA who is doing the Educare reduced hours format. However, it reduces the number of candidates so much that I don't know if this is a good approach.

Also, are there any other agencies that have something similar to Educare?