Pekin Community High School has long been home to one of the largest, most comprehensive Career and Technical Education programs in the state. One of the pathways in this department is our Early Childhood and Childcare education program. As a part of this pathway, high school students can take electives focusing on early childhood education and guidance to name a few. These classes require students to have hands-on experience planning lessons, supervising, and taking care of infants, toddlers, and preschool-aged children.

Our Childcare Program has been around for decades, but in 2018 PCHS transformed the hands-on lab classroom into what is now called Little Dragons Daycare. With the challenge of the teacher shortage looming, we wondered if being able to offer an in-house daycare would help us recruit and retain teachers/staff while also providing us with the needed “subjects” for our high school students to work with. We received positive feedback from staff while we researched “how” we could run an on-site, full-time daycare. In the fall of 2018, we opened our Dragon Daycare to 19 babies and toddlers of full-time staff members. What a positive impact it has made on our school environment!

The number of “littles” in our daycare has grown each year with 26 children from 20 different families being served this year alone. Our staff members come to work, drop off their child(ren), and know that they are being well taken care of by certified staff members as well as high school students in our childcare program. The program has a director as well as six paraprofessionals who teach using the early learning standards; these same standards are also used by the high school students when they prepare and teach lessons within the daycare. Our daycare is also truly a lab school.

The daycare has expanded twice and now has two separate spaces; an infant/toddler space and a Pre-K space, both complete with kitchenettes, crib space, and an enclosed, outside courtyard. Dragon Daycare collaborates with other programs in the CTE as well as other departments. The Foods classes make snacks for the daycare, FFA students read books to Pre-K, and the Graphic Design classes create projects. Students in some of the foreign language classes have made guest appearances to teach some language lessons, and the PCHS Hardscape class even upgraded the sandbox in the play area this fall.

Our little dragons dress up for trick or treating in the building for Halloween; they put on a holiday show for family and friends on the last day of school before winter break, and our five-year olds take part in a preschool graduation ceremony at the end of the year. Our Little Dragon Daycare has even taken part in our annual homecoming parade and hosted their own “friendsgiving” this November. Parent and school counselor, Theresa Black stated, “The littles bring daily joy throughout the building as they take daily walks through the halls.”

So while our high school students benefit from working with a variety of ages/developmental levels of young children, our staff benefits from having affordable childcare housed in the same building in which they are working. There is a cost to this program; as such, parents pay $30/day for the childcare, which is about one-third of the cost of commercial daycares in the area. Our staff and students “build strong bonds with families; many of these children are in our program for five years and some have siblings that attended before them,” stated Director Molly Brian. 

We fully anticipate that starting with Pekin Community High School’s Class of 2032 we will have a few past Little Dragons as a part of our graduating class! By trusting our instincts and creating this program on campus, we have made an incalculable impact on our staff, our school, and our future.