Given the unanimous response from my post about, “What are we doing with our kids this year?!” I’ve decided to share the information I’ve collected to best guide you and help you through the great unknown. Will schools open? Well, it’s unclear, but in an effort to plan and prepare as much as possible, I found these 4 female founders who have inspired me, and created businesses to have us covered in a number of ways this year. For some of us who are at high risk, or have family members who are immune compromised, these options will serve as great tools for home-schooling and tutoring, as well as assistance with zoom school if that is the route you’re taking. Playful Learning, Admit New York, Blue Balloon, and Braintrust have all been interviewed below to give you a better idea of what each service delivers, so read them thoroughly to see what works best for your family, reach out and tell them Mama & Tata sent you!
ADMIT @ HOME
How many years have you been in business in NYC?
5 years, but Admit @ Home is a brand-new initiative developed in response to COVID-19.
How did you get your start and what was your initial inspiration?
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced everyone to adapt to a new-normal. Admit NY is here to help families navigate this challenging time. We recognize that virtual learning is not a fit for all kids and that parents are stretched thin juggling various responsibilities as they adjust to this new way of life. Like many families, we continue to monitor the evolving announcements regarding the 2020-2021 school year, and we want to ensure that students are receiving a high-quality education whether in-person, remotely or via a hybrid schooling model.
To that end: We are excited to announce the launch of our new academic model, Admit @ Home, a supplemental enrichment program that is meant not to replace, but instead to complement, students’ primary school. This program will provide young students with small group instruction, social interactions, and a supportive learning environment that will help them foster social-emotional and developmentally appropriate skills.
What do you feel differentiates you from others in your field?
The team spearheading Admit @ Home has a collective 30+ plus years of experience in education prek-12 in the public, private and charter sectors - both instructional and operational. Our experience includes supporting and advising public schools on their COVID response and planning.
Admit NY, as a company, is committed to creating equity in education and as this is part of our company’s mission, Admit @ home will follow suit. Admit @ Home will also incorporate a give back program in an effort to support low income families and ensure they receive quality educational resources and supports during these challenging times.
How do you positively impact your clientele?
Admit @ Home is a great example of how Admit NY goes above and beyond to support families and their educational needs. The core business we serve is to support families with school admissions, nursery through high school, with a focus on school fit. Our admissions support is the most personalized, tailored, and individualized within our industry. This new short-term @ Home offering is an example of us listening to our clientele and responding to their ever-changing needs.
What is your favorite part of your job?
Relationship building and empowering our students to be the drivers of their admissions process.
Working with our families, helping them identify their child’s best fit schools, supporting them through a complex process that we know intimately well, and watching our students thrive in their new school communities.
What is Admit @ Home?
We pair interested families with other families in their neighborhood to form an at-home instructional setting for their child(ren) or support an already-formed pod of families with operations and administration. We match each pod with highly skilled educators who will provide in-person supplemental academic instruction and opportunities.
How it works:
We help families form a pod of up to 5 children in the same age group
We supply each pod with an Admit-vetted educator that we have hand selected for each group
The educator provides students with age-appropriate instruction and activities
The pod meets at the family’s home or rotates between homes in-person
The pod meets each week at consistent times and days that fit the pod’s availability and existing school schedules
We monitor frequent testing and health checks to maintain the safety of the pod participants
Finally, Admit NY, as a company, is committed to creating equity in education and as this is part of our company’s mission, Admit @ home will follow suit. Admit @ Home will also incorporate a give back program in an effort to support low income families and ensure they receive quality educational resources and supports during these challenging times.
What is the most memorable feedback a client has given you?
“We loved building a great relationship/friendship with our Admit NY point person. She transitioned from advisor to friend and cared about our son’s opportunities like he was her own. I could tell that Admit NY took the time to learn about our family and cared about our child’s results. Really cared. Also, they were there to help us. Once we started working with them, our anxiety levels decreased immeasurably. Great people at Admit NY.” — Parents of Riverdale Student
Pay it forward and name your top colleagues in the same field or related field:
We work with some incredible tutors and test prep professionals, to highlight a few:
Noodle Pros
Private Prep
Brain-Grow
City Kid Explorer
Metro Academic Prep
What is the best advice anyone's ever given you? Or what is your "mantra" / words to live by?
My husband says: “Happy wife, happy life”. ☺
As moms, the day can escape us, what is your best time-saving trick?
Calendar in time for everything, even time to take a shower or a walk
How can our readers contact you to learn more?
Email us at home@admitny.com. For more information on our admissions support, check out our website at Admitny.com.
BRAINTRUST
How many years have you been in business in NYC?
Braintrust is a new business launching this August, but it is built using the knowledge I’ve gained over the past decade working in NYC as a classroom teacher, a private tutor, and the owner of another tutoring business.
How did you get your start and what was your initial inspiration?
I began my teaching career in a special-needs classroom where I quickly realized I loved working with students one-on-one but did not always enjoy managing a classroom – plus I could barely make ends meet on just a teacher’s salary. That led me to take on individual tutoring work, and slowly but surely I was able to build up a roster of families and eventually transition to tutoring full-time. As demand outgrew my availability, I began to hire on additional teachers to work with me, and in that way, I built my initial tutoring business, Smarten Up. In the spring of 2019, though, when I was eight months pregnant, all those crazy hormones worked in my favor, and I had an a-ha moment – I realized that I could be of far greater service to the one in five students with learning differences by building an online marketplace that connects parents with the right certified teachers and learning specialists and that offers an amazing service experience like what Smarten Up has been able to provide. So I spent my maternity leave writing my business plan between nursing sessions, and since then I’ve been hard at work with my co-founder, Jen Mendelsohn, building the tutoring solution of our dreams.
What do you feel differentiates you from others in your field?
Qualifications, transparency, access, and service. There are a lot of tutoring companies in NYC that charge crazy high prices to work with super smart Ivy League graduates. Intelligence, however, doesn’t necessarily make someone a great instructor, especially for younger students, and those companies usually don’t have a great tools for tracking progress aside from a student’s grades. At the same time, there are a lot of really talented teachers looking to tutor, but many rely on word-of-mouth recommendations, which often lead to dead ends because of scheduling conflicts and the like. With Braintrust, parents have their pick of passionate, experienced, certified educators who have (1) the training to address a wide range of learning needs, (2) availability to work when and where the family needs tutoring, (3) a much more competitive price point, and (4) can provide concrete and measurable feedback on students’ progress and learning development.
What do you feel gives you longevity in this big city with so many options?
A great service experience creates a dedicated customer. While in college, I worked as a maître d’ at Balthazar, and it was incredible training for how to run a great business. We are building a platform that enables us to monitor progress, gain feedback from customers, learn from experience, and create community. I am confident this will build trust and allegiance so that we can continue to grow with and support all the families we work with.
How do you positively impact your clientele?
Our mission is empowerment! First, we empower parents to understand what their child needs, how she is progressing, and what they can do to support her. Connecting with a great teacher for tutoring is a crucial first step, but with many other companies, it’s the only step. At Braintrust, parents receive detailed, easy-to-digest reports that enable them to understand what their children are learning, what they’ve mastered, and what they still need to learn. This puts parents in a better position to understand learning and to advocate for their kids.
Second, we empower teachers to earn more and stress less doing what they love – teaching!
Finally, and most importantly, we empower children to develop the skills and confidence to thrive in and out of the classroom.
What is your favorite part of your job?
I love the relationships I am able to build with families. As a tutor, I am able to grow with my students. With so many of my clients, I’ve been a part of their learning experience from becoming a reader to writing essays on Shakespeare, and I’ve attended their bat and bar mitzvahs and they came to my wedding. It’s such a special experience to play such a unique role in my students’ lives.
What is your favorite secret NYC spot?
My favorite hidden gem is an amazing Italian restaurant in Clinton Hill called LaRina. They have incredible homemade pastas and sauces, delightful staff, and the sweetest garden to dine in!
How do you benefit mamas?
Every mother wants to do everything possible to support her child. I hope to give mommies confidence, understanding, and peace of mind – we have enough to worry about!
What is the most memorable feedback a client has given you?
A family recently told me that their experience working with me was life-changing. As a teacher, I hope I can be the educator that a child always remembers – the one who made learning fun and meaningful.
Pay it forward and name your top colleagues in the same field or related field.
I am a huge fan of the team at Milestones Psychology. They do incredible work supporting children and families, and they are a dream team for collaboration.
What is the best advice anyone's ever given you? Or what is your "mantra" / words to live by?
Everything happens for a reason. There are so many ups and downs, and keeping a positive perspective is key. By believing that everything happens for a reason, I can feel confident that there will always be an upside to the inevitable bummers along the way.
As moms, the day can escape us, what is your best time-saving trick?
There is never enough time in the day! I think the thing that most keeps me sane and feeling somewhat in control of my time is a to-do list. With so many things to juggle between being a mom, keeping things organized at home, tutoring the students I love, and running a business, a to-do list helps me keep track of the never-ending tasks and saves me the time of wondering or worrying about what I otherwise would forget!
PLAYFUL LEARNING
How many years have you been in business in the Hamptons?
Playful Learning started as an online resource for parents in 2008. We opened our first brick and mortar learning studio in 2010. Now, we have merged both worlds and offer seamless online and in-person learning experiences.
How did you get your start and what was your initial inspiration?
I started out studying political science in college because I wanted to make the world a better place. The more I learned about society’s most pressing issues, the more I realized that the best way to make social change is through the education of young children. I’ve been blessed to have amazing mentors along the way both in education and business. That said, I would not be the educator I am today if it were not for Bank Street College of Education and my experience teaching at the Dalton School.
What do you feel differentiates you from others in your field?
Our approach to education has been developed over decades of teaching and observing the way children learn best. While we have very clear academic goals for our students, we also follow their lead. We pick upon children’s interests and embed important academic skills within topics they find fascinating. This creates relationships of mutual respect between our teachers and students which is the foundation for all we do.
What do you feel gives you longevity in this big city with so many options?
Playful Learning’s philosophy is built on tried and true best practices in education. Concurrently, we are also pioneering the way with our innovative studio/classroom design, a hands-on approach to learning, and the ability to bridge online and classroom instruction. This combination is what makes us so appealing to families. Parents and children receive the best of what traditional education has to offer, while resting assured that we are always staying on top cutting-edge research and new developments in the field.
How do you positively impact your clientele?
We work with children to develop lifelong habits of heart and mind. We teach them that their questions matter and show them how to seek the answers they are looking for. This sense of intellectual character will serve them well in an ever-changing, unpredictable world.
What is your favorite part of your job?
Without a doubt it is witnessing the magical "aha” moments that children have when they make a new discovery or master a new skill of their own volition. Second to that is developing the curriculum that contributes to these moments.
What is your favorite secret Hamptons spot?
Paddle boarding in Alewive Brooke at Cedar Point.
How do you benefit mamas?
We offer mamas peace of mind. They know that if they bring their children to Playful Learning, they are safe, happy, productive, and constantly learning. Parents witness firsthand how inspired and proud their children are of the work and progress they make with us. And, the fact that their children always ask to come back, helps too ;-).
What is the most memorable feedback a client has given you?
We send our students home with portfolios of their work and hands-on projects at the end of each week. I love to hear about each child’s sense of pride they exhibit when they share their completed work with their families.
Pay it forward and name your top colleagues in the same field or related field.
I’m a big fan of Dr. Aliza Pressman and Dr. Bronwyn Charlton from Seedlings Group. They offer wonderful advice, support, and resources for families on raising resilient, happy children. In the online world, I love what Wonderment Art provides both digitally and in their boxed creative kits for kids. Their curated art experiences are thoughtful and meaningful for children and parents alike.
What is the best advice anyone's ever given you? Or what is your "mantra" / words to live by?
One my favorite quotes on education is by Martin Luther King Jr. "The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character — that is the goal of true education."
As moms, the day can escape us, what is your best time-saving trick?
Preface everything. It’s helpful to have important conversations with children during neutral moments. If you are going on a playdate and want your child to know that it’s important that they leave without a meltdown, have the conversation with them in the car on the way there. Explain what will happen and what your expectations are—you can even role play the situation. That way, you can refer back to your discussion during the more emotionally charged moments when they don’t want leave. This makes life much smoother for everyone.
BLUE BALLOON SONGWRITING SCHOOL
How many years have you been in business in NYC?
10 wonderful years.
How did you get your start and what was your initial inspiration?
When I first started out, I was a teacher at Saint Ann’s in Brooklyn. As a songwriter, I naturally incorporated music into my curriculum and brought songwriting into the classroom. Parents began asking me for guitar lessons for their kids outside of school and within a year or so had a full roster of students and a long waitlist. I decided to leave my day job and focus on what I loved most: teaching songwriting to kids!
What do you feel differentiates you from others in your field?
People love us for our unique, bespoke music lessons and our high touch concierge-like service that puts clients at the forefront. Our team is available 24/7 and is hyper focused on tailoring everything we do to each individual family and each child.
What do you feel gives you longevity in this big city with so many options?
The special community of families and teachers I’ve built over our 10 years in business! We were the first songwriting school and no one does exactly what we do. The brand has stayed consistent and true to its original mission from day one.
How do you positively impact your clientele?
Its been incredible finding out the ways that giving kids an outlet for creative expression has helped them navigate these uncertain times. Helping children develop their unique voice gives them tools they'll use for the rest of their lives.
What is your favorite part of your job?
I love hearing the songs our students write! Of course I love chatting with the moms and our community of teachers, but at the end of the day it’s the creative spark in our students that brings me so much joy.
What is your favorite secret NYC spot?
The garden at Frankies 457. I got married there and it’s such a treat to be able to go back anytime for dinner and a glass of wine!
How do you benefit mamas?
We give their children an enriching activity that brings joy and self-expression into their lives (and also gives them a 45 minute break!).
What is the most memorable feedback a client has given you?
A long time Blue Balloon family moved out of state last year and said the thing they’d miss most about NYC was Blue Balloon! We were able to switch them to online lessons and they’ve been so happy. Soon after, we launched our “Long Distance Lessons” division which positioned us to hit the ground running when the city shut down. Since then, we’ve had countless families who’ve moved away or left the city thank us for quickly adapting in a way that’s allowed them to maintain the connection with their teachers remotely. To see the bonds our clients have with Blue Balloon stay strong and hold together in this time of disconnect and isolation has been tremendously gratifying for me and is so important for the families we work with.
Pay it forward and name your top colleagues in the same field or related field.
Elisa Pupko at Treasure Trunk Theatre! We are running a virtual summer camp collaboration series with them this summer and it’s been magical!
What is the best advice anyone's ever given you? Or what is your "mantra" / words to live by?
Follow your north star! I’m always trying to filter my decisions and experiences based on what is most important to me in my personal life and my overall vision of what I want my company to be.
As moms, the day can escape us, what is your best time-saving trick?
I added an automatic five minute alert to all of my calendar events (and my own children’s classes!) and now I’m always on time!