San Francisco-based childcare solutions provider Wonderschool acquired the ChildcareMatters Mobile Platform, a substitute teaching pool platform providing temporary staffing, from the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee.

Plans call for Wonderschool to integrate the ChildcareMatters platform into its comprehensive SubPool solution to assist governments in matching centers with qualified substitutes.

The transaction closed on April 1; terms were not disclosed. Wonderschool will continue using the ChildCareMatters brand name for the substitute teaching pool platform.

“We are excited to watch Wonderschool scale the ChildcareMatters platform to childcare providers around the country and are thrilled with what they’ve done already in Mississippi,” Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee CEO Hal Cato said in a press release. “Our integration presents an opportunity to ensure childcare providers have access to a vetted substitute teacher pool, which is critical to having a robust workforce and an accessible childcare network.”

The Wonderschool SubPool provides early educators with real-time access to background-screened childcare substitutes. Wonderschool has been licensing ChildcareMatters since September 2023, when it first used it to launch a statewide SubPool in Mississippi.

“Childcare providers are the ‘workforce behind the workforce,’ and when they can't work, the system breaks down,” Wonderschool CEO Chris Bennett said in a press release. “We were pleased with the early usage success of the platform in Mississippi, and we knew this technology would be best served if it could be used by childcare providers to find qualified substitute teachers for temporary care across the nation.”

The move comes after Wonderschool acquired early childhood career marketplace EarlyDay in March 2024 to solve staffing shortages for childcare businesses.