State Funded pre-K in East Cobb (day care, how much, home)

[CHouston]

Hello my family is moving to East Cobb this summer and need to find a good pre-school for our 4 year old and a good day care for our 1 1/2 year old. We know that the state of Georgia offers government funded K-4 programs. We wanted to know how to go about finding these programs in that area. Does anyone know of any programs or how to find a list of them?

[BobKovacs]

Most of the preschools have both paid preschool and the state-funded program. If you can afford to, pay for a "real" pre-K program, because the state program is a joke- it's basically free daycare for people who can't afford daycare, and the curriculum is useless. We put my daughter in there this past October, and pulled her out before Christmas- between her getting sick at least one every 2 weeks (since people dump their kids off with gobs of snot running out of them because they can't miss work), and the fact that she wasn't learning anything useful, we felt it'd be better to just keep her home and teach her ourselves.

When my older daughter was in preschool in NJ (and my younger one was in there last year), every month they'd bring home a sheet telling us what 3 letters, what shapes, and what colors the class would be working on that month. They were constantly bringing home exercises that they'd done in class, etc. In the pre-K program here, they don't teach the alphabet, and all they ever bring home is either fingerpaintings or scribbles on scrap paper. When I asked my daughter what they were working on in class a few weeks ago, she said "we learned about India today". Wow, I thought, that's pretty deep, so I asked what she learned about India. "We learned that the women wear dresses, and sometimes their bellies show". OK....now there's some useful education.......lol.

We've spoken to several people who teach at preschools in the area, and they even said that there's a big difference in what's taught in the state program vs the paid programs, even within the same school.

[Newlife4me]

How much is the Paid "Pre-k"?