Nobody Taught Her How to Run a Preschool. She's Running One Anyway.

EEAS-105: Early Childhood Program Administration · Starts August 2, 2026 at Theoria Technical College

Somewhere in the early childhood field, right now, there is a woman running a center that everyone assumes is being run by someone else.

She is the assistant teacher who has been in the same classroom for eleven years. When the director is out   and the director is always out, because directors are always in five places at once she is the one who fields the parent phone call about the sick child, decides what to do about the substitute who did not show up, writes the incident report, and calls the mother of the four-year-old who bit again. When the health inspector arrives unannounced, she is the one who walks the walk-through. When a new hire needs to be onboarded on their first Monday, she is the one who shows them where the fire extinguisher is.

She has never been taught how to run a preschool. She is running one anyway.

EEAS-105: Early Childhood Program Administration is the course we built for her.

What This Course Actually Teaches

Over five weeks starting August 2, students in EEAS-105 build the concrete leadership competencies that separate a teacher who is good with children from a director who can run a program that serves them well.

The textbook is Hearron and Hildebrand's Management of Child Development Centers (Pearson, 8th edition, 2014), the standard graduate-level text used by NAEYC-accredited programs across the country, organized around twelve director-level competencies including organizational management, fiscal management, personnel and human relations, facilities, health and safety, food service, educational programming, family support, marketing, and program assessment.

Students learn to:

• Build a real budget with actual line items for enrollment, staffing, facilities, food, and quality improvement and defend the trade-offs they made to their board or their owner.

• Write a staffing and professional development plan that recruits well, retains well, and treats teachers like the professionals they are, not the interchangeable parts that half of this industry still treats them as.

• Read and apply the state licensing regulations that govern their program   Title 22, ratios, health and safety inspections, incident reporting, mandated reporter obligations with the fluency of someone who can survive an audit without panicking.

• Design a family engagement plan that goes past the potluck night and actually holds up to what families need.

• Build a comprehensive management plan for their own center the Capstone assignment that they can hand to a board, an owner, a lender, or a licensing analyst and defend line by line.

For the Aspiring Director

If you are the assistant teacher, the lead teacher, or the site supervisor who is already doing most of the work this is the course that will finally give you the vocabulary, the frameworks, and the credentials to name what you have been doing all along.

You do not need permission to enroll in this. You do not need your current director's blessing. You do not need to already have a director title. You need five weeks, a willingness to do the work, and access to a licensed child development site where you can complete your field hours. That is it.

By the end of the term you will have a comprehensive management plan for a center you actually want to run the kind of artifact you can carry into a job interview, present to an owner, or use as the foundation of your own program.

For the Current Director

If you already have the title, this is the course you send your future director to.

Every center needs a bench. Every center loses people. Every retiring director has to be replaced by someone. The teachers on your team who are already carrying director-level responsibility deserve to be trained to hold it before you need them to. And the ones you invest in with real education are the ones who stay.

For the owners and directors who serve on advisory boards, mentor next-generation directors, or run multi-site programs this is the course you can point your bench toward and know they are being trained on the same twelve competencies NAEYC uses to accredit centers, taught by faculty who understand the difference between reading about center administration and having done it.

For the Center Owner Ready to Scale

If you are a family childcare provider looking to open a center, or a small center director thinking about growing to a second location, this is where the practical management education starts. Fiscal, personnel, facilities, regulatory you cannot scale without those, and EEAS-105 gives you the framework for all of them in one term.

Where This Course Leads

Graduates of EEAS-105 move into roles like:

• Site Supervisor leading a single classroom's team and reporting into a director

• Assistant Director running the day-to-day operations while the director focuses on strategy and family relations

• Program Director running an entire early childhood program

• Center Director running an entire center, including staffing, budget, licensing, and family engagement

• Childcare Center Administrator running multi-site or multi-program operations

• Center Owner starting or scaling their own program

EEAS-105 is one of the anchor courses in our Director Certificate pathway (24 units, 8 courses) the stackable pathway designed to move students from the classroom into the director's chair. It is also a required course in the Associate of Science in Early Childhood Education degree.

Enrollment Closes This Weekend

The Fall 2026 term of EEAS-105 launches Saturday, August 2, 2026 and runs for 5 weeks, delivered asynchronously online with a 45-hour Supervised Field Experience component so you can practice everything you learn in the center you already work in or in an approved site of your choice.

Enroll now, or nominate a member of your team: Student Services· studentservices@theoriatechnical.com · (760) 487-8436

Because the woman who is already running the center deserves to be trained for the job she is already doing.

"A college with vision. A career with purpose."