National Teacher Appreciation Week begins Monday, May 4, and runs through Friday, May 8. Within it, National Teacher Appreciation Day is Tuesday, May 5, and National Black Teachers Day is Thursday, May 7. The week is recognized nationally by the National Education Association and the National PTA, and California's governor along with several others have already issued formal proclamations recognizing it.
This is the week most families think to send a card, a coffee gift card, or a thoughtful note. Those things genuinely matter, and we are not going to talk anyone out of them. But Teacher Appreciation Week is also a chance to describe, in honest detail, what the early-childhood educators in our classrooms actually do. Appreciation is easier and more durable when it is anchored in specifics.
So this is a thank-you, with specifics.
What a morning looks like
Take any Tuesday in our preschool wing. The lead teacher is in the room by 7:30 a.m. — before any children arrive. She is setting up the day's invitation areas: a sensory bin, a quiet reading corner, a math activity, an art station. Each one has been planned, not improvised. She knows which child needs to sit near a calm body today, which two children should not be at the same station before snack, which materials worked last week and which ones did not.
By 8:00 a.m., children start arriving. From that point until pickup at 5:00, she is managing roughly twelve simultaneous threads. The child who is missing his blue blanket. The parent who needs to talk for ninety seconds about last night's bedtime. The new student who has been quiet for two days and needs a different doorway in. The fire drill on the calendar at 10:30. The lunch with one peanut allergy and two pickier eaters than usual. The bathroom break that becomes a moment of feelings. The morning circle song that gets a different reception every day. The colleague who needs a five-minute hand at 11:00. The afternoon nap routine that has just been disrupted by a new sibling at home.
The lesson plan is the smallest part of the day. The teacher is the room.
What gets done that you do not see
A lot of what early-childhood teachers do is invisible by design. The skill is precisely that it does not look like work. The room that feels relaxed and welcoming when you walk into it at pickup is the product of an enormous amount of preparation, observation, and adjustment that the children themselves are largely unaware of.
Some of it is paperwork that almost no one outside the field sees: developmental observation notes, daily incident logs, family communication records, lesson plans aligned to state early-learning standards, quarterly progress reports for every child, documentation panels for the studio walls. Some of it is professional development — our educators have collectively logged more than 1,400 hours of PD in the last twelve months, ranging from trauma-informed care to dual-language learner support to the latest literacy research.
Most of it is, frankly, emotional labor. A morning in a preschool room takes a level of patient, sustained, attentive presence that very few jobs in the adult world require for eight hours straight. By 3:00 p.m., when the children are starting to fade, the teacher is also fading. By 5:30, when the last family has left, she is reviewing the day's observations, writing notes for the morning, and rinsing paint out of the smocks.
She comes back the next day and does it again.
The structural reality
It would be dishonest, in a thank-you note, not to acknowledge the larger context.
Early-childhood educators in the United States remain among the most underpaid skilled workers in the labor force. According to NAEYC's most recent workforce surveys, median wages for child-care workers continue to sit well below those of comparably credentialed K-12 teachers, and well below a family-sustaining wage in most regions. The 2026 State of Preschool yearbook from the National Institute for Early Education Research notes that public pre-K enrollment reached a new high of nearly 1.8 million children in 2024–2025, while states simultaneously face deeper budget challenges in 2026 amid expected federal funding cuts. The field is doing more, with structurally less support, than at any point in recent memory.
Our staff at BrightRoots are paid above the regional median for child-care educators, with full benefits and tuition support for credential advancement. We are not where we want to be — we are still building toward full pay parity with public K-12 teachers — and we say so out loud, every year, in our annual report.
If you are a family in this community and you care about early-childhood teachers, the most useful thing you can do during Teacher Appreciation Week is also the most boring: support public funding for early-childhood education, both nationally and in your state. The card matters. The wage policy matters more.
The thank-you part
This is the part we mean.
To every educator who walked into a BrightRoots classroom this year: thank you. Thank you for being on the floor at the child's level. Thank you for the songs we now cannot get out of our heads. Thank you for showing up after a rough night, after a flu cycle, after a personal loss, after a regulatory inspection, on a snow day, on a hot day, on a day a parent yelled at you, on a day a child gave you a folded paper heart.
Thank you for the way you remember every child's name within a week of meeting them, and for the way that child knows you remembered. Thank you for the work that is invisible because you have made it look easy, and for the patience that is invisible because you have not let it crack.
This week is for you. And so is next week, and the week after that.
For families
If you would like to send a note, a drawing, or a small thank-you to your child's classroom this week, we would love that. There is a basket at the front desk for cards. We will make sure they reach the right teacher.
And if you would like to support our educators in a way that scales — through a contribution to our teacher professional development fund, or through advocacy with your local representatives during this state budget cycle — there is a page on our website for that, and we will spell out exactly where the money goes.
Happy Teacher Appreciation Week. We have an extraordinary staff. We hope this week reminds them, and you, of how much they carry.
