THE PLATFORM THAT WILL REMAKE CHILD CARE IN BIG CITIES—AND BEYOND

Affordable child care and early education weigh on millions of American families, especially in key urban areas, where young couples are starting families and struggling to juggle the demands of their work and their offspring. Enter San Francisco–based Wonderschool, a platform that gives people tools to launch their own home-based child care programs. In exchange for a 10 percent cut of each enrolled child’s tuition, the startup, which was founded in 2016 by Chris Bennett and Arrel Gray, helps new caregivers—whom the company calls directors—design their teaching philosophies, get licensed, build a website, and market their services. “If you can empower people to start programs in their homes, it makes economic sense,” mainly, says Bennett, because of high rents in the three markets that Wonderschool currently serves: New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. (Home-based child care can also avoid certain regulations applied to typical child care facilities, like mandates to install a sprinkler system and to provide parking.) Bennett says, by running their own programs, Wonderschool caregivers earn, on average, $78,000 a year—more than triple the average salary of child care classroom staff in the U.S. “We help directors,” says Bennett, “become small-business owners.”