Preschool is just daycare with structure, so it costs more. Optional, privately owned. Nice to do 2-3 days a week for young kids to give them more social and learning opportunites. But it’s not public school, it’s usually just a small locally owned business.
And this was a co-op preschool, which is a special variety of private preschool (usually non-profit) where the parents are usually involved in classes with the kids and much of the maintenance of the school itself is handled through volunteerism of member families.
My wife served as treasurer for the penultimate year, saw the writing on the wall, and then turned the position over to someone else to actually wind down the school. The model just doesn't work where we live: it requires a large number of single-income families so that one parent can be full-time involved in the kids' upbringing, and housing prices are such that single-income families cannot afford homes in the area. As a result, their market just evaporated. People just can't do it anymore.
