Question on an added expense

[stephkb]

DH & I filed Chapter 13 in June of last year. At the time I had one child in half day preschool. His younger brother has now enrolled in preschool and we found out while he does have a speech delay it's not severe enough to ensure a spot in public preschool for the rest of the year or next year. Right now I'm looking into private preschools for him but I don't think we can afford it on our current budget.

Is this a reasonable expense? During the life of our bankruptcy our school expenses are going to go up anyway due to changing from preschool to K then to full day school as well as enrolling our other children in school. It wasn't something we considered at the time of enrolling. Is this something that they expect to see a change in?

I'm currently researching costs & programs to make sure my middle child will actually get something out of the preschool program. The 2 programs I've looked at so far are in the $125-$170 per month (9-11 months of payments) range for 2 half days.

Even without the delay I'm afraid without preschool he'll be behind starting kindergarten - gone are the days of letter people in kindergarten, they're expected to know all their letters & numbers, spell/write their whole name and start in on reading if they're not reading already.

Thoughts? Advice?

[JEM]

Two of my 3 children did not go to Pre-school. And actually my oldest actually went to more of a "daycare" then a pre-school.

Cost for sending the other two to pre-school was just too expensive. We didn't qualify income wise for "public school" pre-K and sending them to private Pre-K was extremely pricey.

So I made the decision to work with them at home "above and beyond" what I was already doing. We worked on learning to write their names, on the alphabet etc....

You can get all sorts of neat learning tools at teachers helper type stores and book stores.

And you know what, by the time they started Kinder, both of them were WAY AHEAD of all the other kids. LOL.

Just wanted to add my experience. I remember being so worried my kids would be behind because they didn't do Pre-K or Pre-school and I spent all that time worrying for nothing.

[tigergem]

Geez. Next thing you know there will be a requirement that kids know all this stuff in utero to be eligible for a birth certificate.

Too bad they can't just let babies be babies for a while. For speech delay I guess I would read out loud to the child more often. My boys had July birthdays, so I had them go to kindergarten twice. (Different school districts. In one case, different countries.)