What follows is the history of how the Paideia nursery and preschool program was started and the multitude of issues that were encountered to organize, fund, staff, manage and integrate this program as a valued ministry of the St Katherine Church community.

I am writing this for several reasons.  The first being that it has been 15 years since the idea of this program began and I had hoped that by now it would have achieved a more solid operational footing and greater enrollment and unfortunately it has not. I believe we learn from the past and history is important in that it provides the hindsight that hopefully will help the new leadership of the program to better understand the nature of the obstacles that they may encounter and avoid some pitfalls and unnecessary conflict.  The second reason is that I hope readers outside of our small Church community may read this and it would help them create a similar program.  Finally I believe the Paideia nursery and preschool program is a new Educational paradigm for Greek Orthodox Churches in America and ultimately this blog is here to support their growth.