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After 2008, we filled seats with special programs built around one moment in a family's life. Here is how to run one in 2026, plus a playbook for partnering with local employers.

Featuring Dr. Teri DeLucca, Founder & CEO of Impact Early Education Watch the full webinar replay here. Ask most leaders how to help a struggling teacher and you'll hear some version of the same plan: encourage more, incentivize more, motivate more. Dr. Teri DeLucca opened this session by challenging that instinct head-on. Motivation, she argued, isn't what's missing. What teachers actually need is to be understood as individuals, coached in a way that fits who they are rathe

With everything else going on at your center, posting one job listing and waiting for the applications to roll in can feel like the easy move. But more and more, that approach just isn't enough. You have to cast a wider net. Qualified early childhood teachers are harder to find than ever, the strongest candidates are interviewing at three other centers the same week you reach them, and background checks and clearances can stretch the timeline for weeks. Meanwhile you're cover

As the back-to-school rush settles into a routine, families are starting to form an impression of how your program communicates. And because enrollment never really stops, that impression gets made year-round, whether a family starts in September or February. Communication, of course, runs both ways. Not only will you be reaching out with the hard conversations, the late pickup, the incident report, the tuition change, but families will also have concerns of their own to rais

Featuring Tameenah Adams, SHRM-CP, Founder and CHRO of ChildcareHR Watch the full webinar replay here. AI is changing the way childcare businesses operate, helping leaders move faster on hiring, communication, and daily decision-making. But as Tameenah Adams, SHRM-CP, showed us in this session, that same speed can introduce serious risk without the right HR practices in place: privacy exposures, inconsistent hiring decisions, poor documentation, and choices that leave a cente

Nowadays, parents touring your center have likely done their homework, arriving with a mental checklist of red flags pulled not just from instinct or word of mouth, but from the countless online articles telling them exactly what to avoid. That means more formulated, direct questions, and an expectation of concrete answers in return. As a parent who's recently had the experience of touring childcare centers and summer camps myself, I've found that all of those concerns tend t

For childcare centers, August brings the most inquiries of any month. September converts more of them than any other month. Most of what separates a strong fall from a slow one happens between those two facts. IntelliKid Systems analyzed 51,825 childcare inquiries received in a single month, February 2026, and tracked them over the following five months, alongside 355,000 recorded family calls from January through June 2026. The goal was to find which parts of the enrollment

Featuring Kate Woodward Young, M.Ed, Co-Founder and Co-Host of Childcare Conversations Watch the full webinar replay here. Most childcare leaders treat break-even as a number that lives in a spreadsheet, something the bookkeeper tracks and everyone else checks in on once a year. But as Kate Woodward Young, M. Ed, showed us in this session, that number is really shaped by decisions made every single day: how classrooms are enrolled, how staff are scheduled, what tuition is set

Watch the full webinar replay here. Every childcare director knows the feeling: summer is winding down, and suddenly the phone won't stop ringing with new family inquiries, classrooms are shifting around room transitions, and paperwork starts piling up faster than anyone can file it. Back-to-school isn't just busy, it's the single window where a center's enrollment for the entire year can be won or lost. We built this session for exactly that moment, bringing in our own IKS P