cathy tyskowski

After 26 Years, Extended Day Care Is a Way of Life

By Gretchen R. Crowe
HERALD Staff Writer
(From the Issue of 10/12/06)

Cathy Tyskowski has three grown sons, but for 26 years she has been raising hundreds of children. Tyskowski, a parishioner at the Cathedral of St. Thomas More in Arlington, founded the diocese’s first extended day program at St. Thomas More Cathedral School in the early 1980s. Now, according to the Office of Catholic Schools, there are 35 programs.
Growing up in a military family, Tyskowski lived in the eastern United States, Europe and the Middle East before settling in Northern Virginia with her childhood sweetheart, now a retired employee of the Drug Enforcement Agency.
The school’s extended day program began unofficially when Tyskowski, who has a degree in early childhood education and who was a regular volunteer at the school that her boys attended, helped families with after-school carpooling.
“When it got to the point that I was picking up 10 to 12 kids an afternoon,” Tyskowski said she talked to the principal about developing a formal after-school program. The program started in 1984, with Tyskowski and two other women baking snacks in their own homes and spending afternoons making arts and crafts with 32 kids.
“We started on a very small scale,” she said.
Twenty-two years later, Tyskowski is still at it, although she and eight other employees now watch over 35 children in the mornings and 100 each afternoon.
“One of the greatest rewards is seeing these children grow,” Tyskowski said. Most teachers just see the students from August to May, but “we see them grow from kindergarten to eighth grade.”
Every child in the school is eligible to come to extended day, Tyskowski said, which charges by an hourly rate. It’s attended by regulars and also those children who only occasionally need to take advantage of the program.
Each day the children intermingle in the cafeteria every afternoon for a snack, outdoor activity, study hall and free time, where they can create arts and crafts or play board games. By keeping all the age groups together, Tyskowski said, the younger children often gravitate to the older, and the middle schoolers often form protective relationships with the elementary schoolers.
“When we see these children graduate from eighth grade, it’s like one of our own because we’ve been taking care of them for nine years,” Tyskowski said. “When I have to give this up, it’s going to break my heart.”

Gretchen R. Crowe can be reached at gcrowe@catholicherald.com.