Schools Involve Nanny in Child’s Education

At the Wildwood School science fair, second-graders Kate and Nell Greenberg were joined by all three people who care for them--their mother, their father and their au pair .

Although parents Lisa Rich and Robbie Greenberg are actively involved in raising the twins, their Swedish-born au pair, 25-year-old Karl Linde, most often deals with their Santa Monica school.

Wildwood, like an apparently growing number of schools nationwide, welcomes the participation of nannies, au pairs, housekeepers and other child-care workers in the school lives of their charges. “When families have involved another adult in the lives of their children, we include them too,” said Anne Simon, head of the school.

For their part, more and more nannies regard helping their charges succeed in school as a far more important part of their job than routine supervision. Holly Smith, a 20-year-old nanny in Encino, said her employers, Simone and Jeff Rayden, made it clear that the education of their three young children was one of their top priorities. “One of the first things they said to me,” Smith recalled, “was that the children’s homework comes first. I was really impressed with that.”

Like many people with in-home child care, Rich and Greenberg, who live in Venice, are working parents. She produces television commercials. He is a cinematographer who must sometimes be out of town for weeks at a time. Rich said she and her husband feel fortunate to have someone like Linde, who “has been in our family for 3 1/2 years,” to enrich their children’s lives as well as care for them day to day.

Linde drives the girls to school in the morning and picks them up in the afternoon. He supervises their piano lessons, offers them soccer pointers, takes them skiing and on other outings and makes their supper. He often answers their questions as they do their homework.

Not surprisingly, members of the Wildwood staff know Linde almost as well as they know the girls’ parents. “For the first three months the girls were in kindergarten, I thought he was their father,” Simon said.

Linde likes to wait for Kate and Nell on the grounds after school so the teachers and other staff can tell him if the girls have a special assignment or activity he needs to know about. He sometimes goes with them on class trips. The one school activity Linde doesn’t take part in are their parent-teacher conferences--Rich and Greenberg think those are too important to delegate, even to Linde.

Simon estimates that the parents of 20% of the private elementary school’s 186 students have nannies or other child-care helpers at home.

“We don’t ask for their names on any of our forms,” Simon said, “but we recognize these people are part of the family. It wouldn’t occur to me not to include them.” The process that binds nannies and other care-givers to the school is very informal, Simon said. For instance, the school routinely asks parents if they would like to include anyone else in school activities. Or a teacher may suggest that a child’s au pair be included in a talk about his or her progress.

Holly Smith said her employers, the Raydens, made a point of introducing her to teachers as the children’s new nanny. Andy Rayden, 7, is a second grader at the Country School in North Hollywood. Kevin Rayden, 6, is a first grader at the Buckley School in Sherman Oaks.

Smith, who has attended school fairs and other campus events, said she and the Raydens routinely pool their information about how the children are doing in school. “Andy has a little bit of a problem with math, and we do a lot of extra work with him,” she said. Sometimes she wields the flash cards, sometimes Andy’s parents do.

Making Homework Exciting

Helping children learn and dealing with their schools was part of the six-month course of study Smith took at the Nanny Institute of Beverly Hills. Barbara Hirsch, the school’s director of instruction, said students are taught such skills as how to make homework more exciting (when the children are studying area , for example, nanny can have them measure their rooms and calculate the area).

The nannies are also taught how to help children do well academically without preempting the children’s parents. “The nannies will usually be the ones who know if homework is being done and they may relate directly with the teachers, but we’re also teaching our nannies not to step on parents’ toes,” Hirsch said. “Part of the nanny’s job is to help the child form a very strong attachment to the parent. The mom will always be there. The nanny won’t.”

All nannies should be trained to enhance the education of their charges, according to Deborah Davis, president of the International Nanny Assn. Based in Claremont, the association is made up of about 450 nannies and educators. Davis said her own student-nannies at Chaffey Community College in Alta Loma are required to spend time as an aide in an elementary school classroom.

Discipline and Deportment

Priscilla Vail, a learning specialist and author in Bedford, N.Y., said that more and more schools are becoming aware of the need to include child-care workers in the educational process. “About five years ago I began hearing that a few schools in isolated places were putting on workshops and other programs for nannies,” she said. Today, several of the 150 private schools she stays in touch with nationwide hold informational sessions for nannies on how the school works, how they can help with homework and how to work with parents on issues such as discipline and deportment.

A growing number ask child-care workers to come in to talk about specific student needs or problems, Vail said. One private school in New York City has a lounge where parents and au pairs can drop in and exchange information. “Informally it’s growing,” said Vail, who estimates that 50% of the schools she works with are attempting to involve nannies and others in some way. Fewer than a dozen have formal programs, however.

Few public schools have programs for child-care helpers, although some ask for the name of the child’s sitter at the time the child is enrolled. Los Angeles Unified School District has no special programs for child-care helpers, a spokesman said.

‘Families Have Changed’

Increased contact with child-care helpers is only one way private schools are trying to respond to a changing American family. Today’s families include not only more baby-sitters, but more working mothers, more single parents, more step-parents. “Our schools are very cognizant that our families have changed and more people have to be included,” said Mimi Baer, executive director of the California Assn. of Independent Schools in Santa Monica, which represents 120 private schools throughout the state.

Wildwood head Simon noted that the school has instituted an after-school child-care program for students with working parents who have no Mary Poppins in their lives. Some schools send out two copies of each student’s report card--one to mother, another to father, wherever they may live. That is the practice at the Carlthorp School in Santa Monica, headmistress Dorothy Menzies said.

Many schools also arrange for separate parent-teacher conferences for divorced parents who both care about a child’s progress but don’t want to sit down in the same room to discuss it.