Procare Early Learning

Procare Early Learning Powered by Learning Beyond Paper is a new, 100% online digital curriculum tailored to meet the needs of children from 6 weeks through pre-kindergarten. Child care centers no longer need to buy expensive books that become outdated. Instead, early educators have access to high-quality lesson plans at their fingertips, integrated into the Procare platform for ease. Because of this early learning curriculum offering, one child care center is saving up to $400 a week!

About Ridge Kids Academy, Inc.

Ridge Kids Academy, Inc., was founded in 1993 as a ministry of Pea Ridge Baptist Church in Barboursville, West Virginia. Since then, the child care center has fostered the spiritual, physical and academic needs of children.

And it has grown tremendously – from about 21 children to 147! It serves children as young as 6 weeks old through 12 years old. Its educational offerings include a preschool program as well as an extended program for school-age children.

It’s moving to a new location, where the center’s enrollment will reach 250 children!

Sarah Miller is the infant/toddler director for Ridge Kids and has held various positions in the child care field for 22 years. Her center has used Procare for more than two years, and it was an early user of the Procare Early Learning powered by Learning Beyond Paper curriculum program.

The Challenge

Before using Procare Early Learning, teachers had to do the research and planning required to create a curriculum for their classrooms. It was incredibly time consuming, so center leaders provided them with time out of the classroom daily to do lesson plans.

But that created another problem — classrooms of course needed to be staffed during that prep time. So the center had to pay for extra employees to teach while the regular teachers were out.

“That’s where the monthly expense was coming in,” Sarah said – between $300 to $400 a week.

The staffing costs were high and so was buying the paper curriculum. Ridge Kids paid around $6,000 for a startup program of books, then had to train employees how to use the program. And when the books were revised, they had to buy more – sometimes at $100 a book, Sarah said.

Teachers were forced to spend large chunks of time writing down learning plans, assessments and milestones on paper.

“It was very hard to follow, for one,” Sarah said of why her teachers didn’t like the paper curriculum. “It had a basic setup, and it would give you ideas, but a lot of it you had to come up with on your own.”

That meant they had to find outside sources on their own, such as blogs and Pinterest, to find lesson ideas.

“It was taking more time to lesson-plan, and in turn, we were paying for more time out of the classroom,” she said.

The Solution

In early 2022, Sarah’s center agreed to be part of a group of early users of this new digital curriculum offering from Procare Solutions.

It was a success, in large part because the curriculum was integrated into Procare, a child care management solution that her teachers already were familiar with.

Gone are the days of scouring the Internet for lesson plans. Now they have 52 weeks of lesson plans for five age groups at their fingertips, with over 4,000 daily and weekly activities created by the experienced educators of Learning Beyond Paper, the leader in digital early education curriculum.

Teachers can access lesson plans and other parts of the curriculum on their iPads, making it easy to use in their classrooms. And they can spend more time doing assessments now that they’re spending less time on lesson planning.

And parents love the digital curriculum. Plus, it’s easier to share what their kids are learning with them. Teachers don’t have to plug in information to share with parents – Procare Early Learning powered by Learning Beyond Paper does
that for them!

“It does save a lot of time, a lot of money and the teachers are able to work in the classroom more with the students,” Sarah said.