Nursery School

Residents along Limekiln Pike are fighting a nursery school proposed for their neighborhood. A potential increase in traffic and the residential character of the area were cited as reasons for opposing a Montessori school at 3672 Limekiln Pike during Tuesday's meeting of the Warrington Board of Supervisors. Six families have hired an attorney, Edward M. Wild, of Power, Bowen & Valimont of Doylestown, and two more families have signed a petition, according to Wild. He plans to argue for the neighbors at a future conditional-use hearing.

Crossing Cooperative Nursery School in Washington Crossing is offering summer programs for children, ages 3 to 5, beginning this month. The school's next session of camp begins on Monday and will feature art, crafts, music, drama, creative movement and imaginative play for children. The campers will also explore the local community during field trips. The camp runs from 9 a.m. to noon, Monday through Thursday, for two weeks. The cost is $95. Additional sessions begin later in the summer.

The Rainbow Academy nursery school can nearly triple its enrollment next fall now that the Northampton Township Zoning Hearing Board has given its owners permission to expand. The school, which now accepts 40 children, ages 3 to 5, in its September- to-June program will be able to accept 110 students once the owners, Mario and Linda La Grotte, renovate the lower level of a barn on their Grenoble Road property into classrooms. The La Grottes needed permission to expand because the school is a non- conforming use on the five-acre tract, which is an environmental protection zone in Ivyland.

In the sprawling white house that has been home to the Lad & Lassie, a Christian nursery school open since 1952, there is a sitting room with elegant sofas, a collection of antique dolls with frippery and curls, and a grandfather clock - the perfect snapshot of Home, Sweet Home. In the adjoining room, rusted animal traps hang from the ceiling, mounted deer heads adorn the wall, and wolves, prairie dogs and bobcats, suspended in motion, line shelves. That, too, teachers and parents say, makes the school that will close Thursday a peerless place in the growing landscape of day-care centers.

Some preschool children are simply too active to sit quietly for an entire story. Others might need help letting go of the hand of the parent who drops them off each morning. On Saturday, the 13th Annual Delaware County Early Childhood Educators Association conference offered some solutions to these and other perplexing nursery-school traumas. "I come here every year, and so do all the teachers at my school," said Ruth Hoffman, who is employed as a teacher at St. Matthew's Nursery School in Springfield.

Maybe teaching a class full of 3- and 4-year-olds how to perform "The Itsy-Bitsy Spider" with their fingers isn't the usual way of learning pediatrics. But it is standard child-development training at Clearview Regional High School's Little Pioneers Nursery School Program. Aimee Radtke, 17, a senior at Clearview, has aspirations of becoming a pediatric nurse. She and her 71 child-development classmates team up every day to teach 46 preschoolers under the supervision of their regular high school teacher.

A dispute between a Methodist church and an affiliated nursery school that forced the extension of the school's winter vacation was resolved, at least temporarily, with the school reopening yesterday under a new name and with a new lease. After 20 years at the Hopewell United Methodist Church in Guthriesville, the Hopewell School became the Brandywine School yesterday. Its new lease will run through May, the end of the school year, school officials said. After that, the church and school will split, a decision that follows a dispute over the school's staffing and the church's desire for the school to increase its religious curriculum.

Toddlers attending the preschool programs at the Hatboro YMCA may continue to play and learn in the renovated house that is used as a nursery school building, the borough zoning hearing board has ruled. During a brief meeting Wednesday night, the board voted 3-0 to approve the request by directors of the YMCA to allow their Kindertot program to continue in the nursery school building at Crooked Billet and South York Roads. Members of the Y said they recently discovered that the nursery school building was not zoned for educational use. Executive director Robert Carpenter said he discovered that the nursery school had been listed under a separate deed from the Y's main building.

CELEBRATING PASSOVER, Eric Busillo and his parents, Judy and John, partake of a special seder. The nursery school at Temple Sinai in Cinnaminson sponsored the dinner April 18 for its pupils. About 20 pupils attended.

With more than a little formality, kindergartners from the Kinder Tag Learning Center had a prom yesterday. The affair, complete with a king and queen, gowns and tuxedos, even corsages, was the third for the West Oak Lane nursery school.