For parents like us, options are limited. Private pre-K can run more than $30,000 a year at the fanciest schools. Depending on the neighborhood, spaces with community-based organizations — private preschools that partner with the state and accept state subsidies but handle their own applications — can be as elusive as public pre-K spots. If home schooling is daunting, and if not schooling feels wrong, the only other choice, it seems, is to join the many parents who have taken matters into their own hands and formed co-ops.

In a co-op pre-K, parents work together to create a school that matches their educational philosophy and worldview. They also run it, finance it, staff it, clean it and administer it — whatever is necessary to keep costs as low as possible. Often, schools operate from members’ homes. Some pupils are taught by parents; others by professional teachers. The downside to such an arrangement? It’s a lot of work. We had learned that a year ago, when we were priced out of private options for our son and banded together with some parents from the neighborhood to form a co-op.

Beyond the effort was the challenge of getting different families to work together. When matters as personal as education, values and children are at stake, intense emotions are sure to follow, whether the issue is snacks (organic or not?), paint (machine washable?) or what religious holidays, if any, to acknowledge. Oh, and in many cases, forming a co-op school is illegal, because getting the required permits and passing background checks can be so prohibitively expensive and time-consuming that most co-ops simply don’t.

Our first co-op school nearly collapsed when families disagreed over how much power our teacher should have, and my husband and I had said we were done with co-ops. And yet, without a seat for my son in a public program, and feeling convinced that he needed the academic and social benefits of prekindergarten, I found myself once again e-mailing friends and surreptitiously recruiting families on the playground.

My introduction to the world of co-op education had come the previous summer at a neighborhood park, when another mom and I began chatting as our nearly-3-year-old sons zoomed their Matchbox cars around in a patch of dirt. When she asked what we were going to do about school, I told her that I had banked on one popular option, but the day I toured it the children were barely engaged in an art project, which left me unable to justify paying nearly $7,000 a year for two half-days of school a week.