Category Archives: school

Why We Chose A Co-Op Preschool

Posted on by
9

I started my blog in the late summer of 2008.  At the time it was just Mrs. Beagle and myself.  It wasn’t long after that we found out we were expecting our first baby.

Side Note: It’s funny because when you look at the comparison between blogs and children, my blog is now considered pretty ‘old’ whereas I still feel like I’m brand new at being a parent sometime.

Who would have guessed even back then how quickly time would fly?  They say time speeds up when you become a parent, and man, that’s so true.

Today is the first day of pre-school for Little Boy Beagle.  He is excited and I’m confident it will be a good experience for him.  He loves to learn.  He loves to play.  He doesn’t love to share so much, and I’m hoping that the environment will help him tune that skill.  He’s pretty excited and so are we.

Turns out, you need to start looking at pre-school options pretty early in the game.  Luckily my wife was on top of it so we were able to do our homework.  From the get-go, my wife favored a co-op preschool.  This is a type of school where the parents are expected to do a portion of the work.  For example, my wife is the Assistant Treasurer for the school.  So far, she has no idea what that that entails because the Treasurer has been too busy to spend much time with her, but from the sounds of it, she’ll be helping track the incoming payments and hounding parents who are late with their bills.  There are other roles from planning external activities to planning and coordinating parties, and all parents must volunteer in the classroom around once per month.

This all made sense to us because:

  1. It keeps parents more involved – It’s important for us to be involved with our kids school and education.  We don’t want to oversee every part of their education, but we realize that we have a big part in determining the success of our kid’s schools, not just expecting that teachers will do all the work.  Staying involved with the classroom is a good step for us to stay involved.
  2. It builds a relationship with the teachers – Being more active in the classroom will give us more face time with his teacher, and allow us to be more aware of what he is doing, what he is succeeding at, and where he might need some help.
  3. It gives us other parents to know – Each parent (usually the mom) works about once per month, and there are two parents there every day.  They rotate it around so you’re not paired with the same parent.  This, along with some of the outside work, will provide a way to meet and get to know other parents.

Surprisingly, the co-op school seems to be fading a bit.  We looked online and several that showed up as co-op schools through search engines have converted to regular pre-schools.  I’m guessing that this is because more and more parents work full time, meaning that they simply aren’t available to do the classroom work that is required.  We have a great feeling about our pre-school, they seem to be doing well (they even added a second session because of higher than anticipated enrollment, likely picking up some of the people that would have looked into the now converted schools I just mentioned), and they’ve been around a while.

Regardless, today is a happy and a sad day.  Pre-school is a big milestone and we are happy that this is a stepping stone for our son’s education, but it’s so sad to believe that the little baby we just held in our arms yesterday (or so it seems) is already heading away from us.

What are your thoughts on co-op preschool?

Copyright 2013 Original content authorized only to appear on Money Beagle. Please subscribe via RSS, follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or receive e-mail updates. Thank you for reading.

Go Look It Up In The Encyclopedia

Posted on by
11

When you were a kid, did you ever ask a question, only to be told, “Go look it up in the encyclopedia?”

Well, moving forward, that will take a whole new meaning.  After 244 years of publishing, the Encyclopedia Britannica will stop producing their volumes in paper edition.  Instead, their wealth of information will be available electronically. I’m guessing this means via website subscription or other digital media.

When I was a kid, I never had a full set of encyclopedias, though I do remember having a sort of encyclopedia-lite set of three volumes, which would provide an overview of most topics.  If I needed the additional detail that the encyclopedia would require, I had to use whatever was available in our school or city library.

Kind of sad, when you think about it.  I’m sure for many, that set of 26 volumes, or however many it actually ended up being, was an institution in their homes.  Kids today will never have that, unless of course, they want to access an old set with potentially outdated information.

As for me, I remember asking a lot of questions about what certain words meant, so what I remember hearing most often was “Go look it up in the dictionary.”

So far as I can tell, Webster is still publishing those in paper form, so as long as that holds, I’ll at least get to pass that one along to my kids!

Copyright 2013 Original content authorized only to appear on Money Beagle. Please subscribe via RSS, follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or receive e-mail updates. Thank you for reading.

Why You Should Always Have A Job While In College

Posted on by
36

Looking back, I had a variety of jobs in college, and I’m glad for every single one of them.  Here are a list of the jobs that I held at one point or another during my four years of college:

  • Tour Guide – Gave tours to potential incoming students.  Lots of fun and I always liked seeing familiar faces the following year.
  • Phone-A-Thon Rep – This only lasted a week or two, but we got to call alumni and bug them for money.
  • Computer ‘Lab Rat’ – Sat in one of the three computer labs that the college had, answered questions, did troubleshooting on basic problems, and acted as a deterrent to people overusing the printer.
  • Resident Assistant – My senior year, I was an RA on a freshman hall.  Man, did I feel old!
  • Paid Internships – I was in a program which required us to do two internships, one instead of taking classes for a semester (we made them up with a summer session) and another the following summer.  Both were paid.
  • Working back at home – My aunt and uncle owned a collectibles store, and if I was home for the holidays or for the summers where I wasn’t involved with internship activities, I’d work there.

I was lucky enough to not have student debt during college.  My parents saved up on my behalf and I had scholarships, which funded my college experience.

Still, I would not have traded the job experiences I had for anything.  Here’s why you should always have a job while you’re a college student;

  • It gets you used to having a job – Let’s face it, the goal for most people in college is to graduate college and get a job.  The transition to the full-time grind will be much easier if you ease into it.
  • You’ll meet people – I met so many different people at the various jobs.  Some became friends that lasted throughout college and some even beyond.
  • You get money – As I said above, I was lucky enough to have my college funded, but regardless if you need the money to pay tuition (or rack up less student debt), or have spending money (or saving money), you’ll be thankful for every dollar you get.
  • You’ll learn skills – Most of the jobs I had above advanced my direct or indirect skills.  My tour guide experience got me more comfortable with talking to strangers and also being somewhat of a salesperson.  As a ‘lab rat’, I kept up with technology and learned the everyday problems that ‘users’ face.  This directly helped me as I forged a path in IT after graduation.
  • It keeps you out of trouble – Let’s face it, there’s a lot of temptation to get into trouble and a lot of that comes from having too much available time.  Take some of that time away and you’ll be less tempted to get excessively carried away.  I still had my share of fun, but having a number of hours taken up by various jobs, gave me a nice balance so that my times of being an idiot were likely drastically reduced.

So, if you’re in college or going to college, the question shouldn’t be “Do I need to work?” it should be “What job should I be looking at?”

What’s your experience with working while in college?

Copyright 2013 Original content authorized only to appear on Money Beagle. Please subscribe via RSS, follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or receive e-mail updates. Thank you for reading.

Should College Students Be Forced To Have Health Insurance?

Posted on by
25

I wasn’t aware of this, but apparently more and more colleges are requiring that students have health insurance.

One of our local papers reported that Michigan State is the latest school to put this type of program in place, and say that it’s currently in place or rolling out at 25% of colleges across the country, a number that is growing.

The cost ($1,500 per year) is nothing to sneeze at, but when it comes to health insurance, is actually pretty cheap, though I’m guessing it’s a pretty bare bones plan, and that since most college kids stay reasonably healthy, is a pretty low cost plan to the provider as well.

Still, it raises a few questions:

  • What if you forget to provide proof?  Could you get billed for coverage you already have? If so, will some simply overlook this or have an administrative battle on their hands to back out of it?
  • Is this any of the schools business?  The article I posted the link to never really indicated the rationale behind this, except to say that colleges want to ensure that students don’t have to choose between education and paying for a health care bill.  I can see this but it seems a little flimsy.
  • Is this tied into Obamacare somehow?  I thought this bill required that everybody have health insurance by a certain date.  Is this a way to get in front of this for the student population?

Back in my college days, I was covered under my parents insurance plan, so this wouldn’t have applied to me.  But, I expect more and more students are uninsured, and I wonder how this affects them.

If you were attending college, would this type of requirement make you more or less likely to attend that particular college?  Do you see this as an infringement on a students right or as a way to take a potential bad decision out of the students hands?

Copyright 2013 Original content authorized only to appear on Money Beagle. Please subscribe via RSS, follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or receive e-mail updates. Thank you for reading.

A Lesson Learned In High School: Be Prepared For The Inevitable

Posted on by
10

There was a high school teacher with whom I clashed almost from day one.  I really didn’t like the class and the teacher, unfortunately, made it clear that you could get under his skin.

So a few of us did.

We didn’t do anything out of routine mischief, but it was enough to annoy him to the point that we got punished from time to time.  Nothing we did was serious enough to get detention or sent to the vice-principal’s office, but I did get used to his punishment of choice:

Writing that ‘stupid sentence’.

For whatever reason, the teacher thought it was fitting to have us write ‘Familiarity Breeds Contempt’ as a punishment.  It wasn’t the first teacher in my time to assign sentences (though I honestly think it might have been the last), so I got used to it.

So much so, in fact, that I prepared myself for getting punished.

I started writing them in advance.  Now, I suppose I could have just stayed out of trouble, but being a high school kid, that was pretty hard, plus by a certain point all I’d have to do was smile when someone else did something and I’d get assigned punishment.

So, I actually did have an advance stash of these ready.  And this can apply to your financial life.

Here’s a few lessons:

  1. Lower your risk – One time, I got assigned sentences the same day I had to finish getting ready for a big test.  Having to take the time for writing lines took valuable time away from my studying.  Having my stash ready mitigated this risk.
  2. Keep it secret – While I wrote the sentences out, I didn’t do so in front of other classmates or the teacher, knowing that if he caught wind that I had them ready, he would have certainly changed the sentence or something else so to thwart my plan.

Having these sentences written out was almost an emergency fund of sorts.  A lesson I learned from goofing off actually paid off in the personal finance aspect of my life years later.

And who would have ever guessed that high school mischief could turn into a life lesson?

Copyright 2013 Original content authorized only to appear on Money Beagle. Please subscribe via RSS, follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or receive e-mail updates. Thank you for reading.