NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Buhler USD 313 Superintendent Cindy Couchman told Hutch Post the open houses on Tuesday for their new facilities went well, in her opinion.
"I didn't know what to expect," Couchman said. "I've never been a part of hosting an open house at different facilities. We had our three new construction facilities open. The Buhler Beginnings Daycare in Buhler, I think we had 17 people that walked through in our community to look at it, which for an hour and a half, and Buhler on a busy night, we had home volleyball, a lot of things going on. It was really nice to see everybody walk through. I think we had more than that at Crusader Corner Daycare. We probably had upwards towards 30 go through that facility, and maybe 10-ish go through our Ad Astra facility. It was just really nice to have people come and look at kind of the changes."
The new daycares are filling up, but they are not full yet.
"We did a slow, soft start opening, which I would encourage anyone who's opening a daycare to do that and not open full, that is sort of what we have done," Couchman said. "We've tried to add like five to 10 kids every week between the two of them. Our infant spots, I believe are kind of spoken for in full. We've been adding like two to three every week of the infants and like four to five to six of the toddlers. And we do still have openings in the toddler. I think our infants are getting close to being full and spoken for."
Balancing classes so that those infants can be promoted promptly while still filling the older classes is a challenge.
"The logistics on that's kind of interesting," Couchman said. "You know, the infants, you know, they age out into the toddler room as soon as they're walking and they can go to the toddler room. You know, those age out and go to the three-year-old program. As one infant comes out, you wanna make sure you have a space for them. There are different ways of doing that. We have a mixed room, which means that you can have both age groups in the room. Then we have just an infant-only room. And so, yeah, you should see the chart that we have, you know, different ages and it shows, you know, like when they would age out to the next room and what that cycle looks like. There's actually a program that does it for us, which is kind of nice."
If you have questions, you can find out more at their website at https://www.usd313.org/.