U P S T A R T
HEAD OF THE
CLASS
A
DANIELLE SUNDE FOUNDED THREE SCHOOLS WHERE KIDS LEARN AS THEY PLAY
“AS MY OLDEST WAS TURNING 3, WE THOUGHT, ‘Oh man, maybe we should [open] a preschool.’ At the time I was a little perplexed. We found this really lovely in-home preschool in Carrboro. Toward the end of that school year, the woman who owned it said she wasn’t going to continue. We started looking around for a preschool and just didn’t find anything that really resonated. It seemed like there were lots of other families that were struggling with finding a program [where] they liked the quality and the philosophy. My husband said, ‘We could totally do this. We could figure this out.’ I told him he was nuts. But then we got into it and became really passionate about it. It sort of just grew from there. Our director our first year was actually [the woman] who was the one closing her preschool. She got us through that first year and then we were really lucky to figure out what we wanted to be. [Our PlayHouse Chapel Hill] didn’t start off as a Reggio Emilia-inspired program. We were play-based and we just knew we wanted to allow children to be children. We felt like all of these programs we would go visit there was all this forced academic rigor for preschoolers. For us, it just seemed silly to ask 4-year-olds
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chapelhillmagazine.com March 2018