Hayley Leibson, a mother from Mill Valley, a wealthy area just north of San Francisco, started hunting for a language-immersion child care program when her son was 8 months old, initially searching without the help of edtech tools.

“I thought I was really early,” Leibson says, noting that her son wasn’t going to attend until he turned 2. Some schools laughed her out of the room, telling her that other families applied as soon as they became pregnant.

Transitional kindergarten, a public early education program for 4-year-olds in California that provides a structured bridge between preschool and kindergarten, had been cut from her region for the 2025-2026 school year. Leibson says she felt the cut put extra pressure on her to find a private option.

But right away she noticed that the application process presented what she thought were ludicrous hurdles. Schools asked Leibson to write essays about her son’s “learning style” — before he could even talk — and demanded specific details about Leibson’s connection to families already attending those programs, such as listing out the last time she saw them and what they did together.

Mostly, Leibson spent a lot of time vetting programs without the help of edtech tools. Meetings occurred when it was convenient for the care providers, meaning Leibson had to rearrange her own work schedule. Before inspecting a program, Leibson found it nearly impossible to discern whether the school seemed to her like a money-grab that didn’t care much about the kids. Options with rave reviews on Google would be run-down when she visited.

“It was like a part-time job — very time-consuming and hard,” she says.

It helped her to chat with teachers and other parents, who warned her of pest problems and other issues. “The most valuable are people who don’t go [to a school] anymore,” she adds.

After going through all that, programs would reject her son because he had difficulty napping or because of rules about potty training she considered wacky. When offers came in, providers would “explode” if Leibson didn’t accept within a short period of time, sometimes as brief as 24 hours.

Read the full article about navigating school choice options by Daniel Mollenkamp at The 19th.