Atlanta’s Toddler Tutor wants Black children ready before the first day of school
From birth to the first day of kindergarten, a child gets roughly 1,825 days.
Tangee Peek, better known online as The Toddler Tutor, has built a career around making sure parents don’t waste them.
“There’s this misconception that learning starts in kindergarten,” she says. “From the day a child is born to the day they walk into kindergarten at five, there are exactly 1,825 days. Parents are the child’s first teacher. Time is the one thing we can’t get back. So I’m gonna need us to use it wisely.”
For Peek, a former Atlanta Public Schools teacher and administrator, those years aren’t simply about getting children ready to read. They’re about making sure children, particularly Black children, enter school prepared to succeed.
“Kindergarten is the new second grade,” she continues. “I’m just gonna keep it a buck with you, a child who walks in without the basics — a few letters, their name, some numbers — risks falling behind before they’ve even settled in.”
Peek’s on a mission.
“I want to be an answered prayer to parents, not replace them,” she says. “I want them to feel empowerment and confidence to be their child’s first teacher.”
The equity stakes
Peek sees the equity stakes behind it. She’s seen them up close, for years.
Black boys, specifically, are pulled into special education programs at disproportionately high rates — a reality Peek has watched play out firsthand for nearly two decades.
Nationally, Black students are identified with a disability at rates about 40 percent higher than their peers overall, and roughly twice as likely to be identified with an emotional disturbance or intellectual disability, according to research compiled by Child Trends.
During a recent teacher training session, Peek asked a room of educators to imagine a struggling student and give that “scholar” a name. Without exception, every teacher volunteered a boy’s name.
Kindergarten readiness, in her framing, isn’t a nice-to-have.
“Particularly getting Black kids ready to go into an environment where you can’t control everything,” she said.
That’s how she describes the stakes of those 1,825 days.
The calling
Peek was supposed to be a lawyer.
She was on track for a political science degree from Clark Atlanta University in 2002, planning on law school, when a required visit to housing court cracked something open. She watched evictions happen in real time — families, kids, whole lives, decided in minutes.
A professor, watching her openly tearful reaction, gently told her that law might not be her thing.
It was on the drive home from church, sitting in Atlanta traffic with her best friend, Ebony Wheeler, that the answer finally came out on its own.
“I’m gonna be a teacher,” she said.
“Where did that come from?” Wheeler asked.
Peek didn’t fully know. But she enrolled in Clark Atlanta University’s teacher certification track before the semester was out, waiting tables at Houston’s in Buckhead to make it work.
The next two decades unfolded inside Atlanta Public Schools: years as a classroom teacher and a reading specialist, and eventually a promotion into administration. Along the way, Deerwood Academy named her its 2010-11 Teacher of the Year.
Six words and a prayer
By 2018, Peek had become exactly the kind of educator she once dreamed of being — a school administrator, the teachers’ teacher, a title that looked perfect on paper. It didn’t feel that way from the inside. She knew the job. She was good at it. But something about it never quite felt like the right spot.
That year, she had an epiphany.
Peek sat down with a notebook and wrote six words: “The Toddler Tutor. God is watching.”
“That moment solidified for me that God hears prayer — and He answered,” she says. “I knew that this was something I had to do even though I had no idea how. He is my God, and I trust Him.”
She had no business plan apart from that notebook of faith.
Permission to think big
She gave the idea a try during the pandemic — a custom learning box, built for a friend’s son, Grey, put together from the same instinct that would later become Busy Books: that a child learns fastest when the material feels like it was made just for them.
His mother, Eddie Brumbaugh, saw what Peek had made and told her flatly that whatever she thought The Toddler Tutor was, it was going to be bigger than that.
“She urged me to get a product that could make me money in my sleep,” Peek says. “Eddie gave me permission to think big.”
That permission became Busy Books, personalized early-learning tools built around the same assessment-first approach Peek used in her classroom.
What letters does a child already know? Which shapes still trip them up? Where are their fine motor skills? From there, Peek builds a book around the child: matching uppercase and lowercase letters, sounding out a first letter, tracing their own name.
“You don’t need another resource,” she wrote in a recent Instagram post to her followers. “You need to know that what you’re already doing matters.”
Alignment, not sacrifice
Leaving her full-time, leadership job in the summer of 2023 wasn’t a sacrifice. It was alignment — walking toward what she was already built for, not giving something up to get there. That doesn’t mean it was easy.
“It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” she says of walking away from what she calls her dream job — being the teachers’ teacher. “God was forcing me out of where I was to take me higher.”
As an administrator, she coached about 10 teachers at a time.
As “Coach Tangee,” she has trained roughly 150 educators at Born To Teach Con — one of the largest early childhood education conferences in the country.
By her estimate through social media, she has reached thousands more parents, teachers and stakeholders.
Home base
Community Co., a homeschool hybrid in McDonough, gives Peek a place to put her educational philosophy into practice. The program combines classrooms with co-working space, allowing parents to work under the same roof where their children learn. Founder Chivon Carter created it after she and her husband struggled to find a childcare option that balanced strong academics with the nurturing environment they wanted for their own children.
Peek designs Community Co.’s academic core.
Her classroom carries her own social-emotional touches: a poster of illustrated melanated children naming 20 different emotions hangs within easy reach. The bookshelf leans hard into representation, with “Ballet Brown” and “Last Stop on Market Street” alongside the usual early-reader staples like “The Three Little Pigs.”
At her largest APS classroom, Peek had 27 students. At Community Co., her twice-daily sessions have fewer than half that number. She knows each child’s preferences, habits and moods well enough to adjust a lesson on the fly.
She calls it a “superpower” made possible by a student-teacher ratio most public school educators rarely get.
Ask a room of Peek’s 5-year-olds how they learn best, and they’ll give genuinely different answers — hands-on, visual, talked-through out loud — each one reinforced by her directly.
“Anything the children are doing academically, that is 1,000% Miss Tangee’s brain,” Carter says. “Without Miss Tangee, our academic program would not look the way it does.”
Today, tomorrow and beyond
Ask Peek to introduce herself, and she doesn’t lead with a job title or a company name. She leads with an order of operations.
“Believer. Woman. Mom. Servant. Educator,” she says. “And, most recently, The Toddler Tutor.”
Ask what The Toddler Tutor looks like five years from now, and Peek is sure.
Peek envisions The Toddler Tutor growing into a network of educators offering in-home instruction, microschooling and private sessions to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children. She wants Busy Books in childcare centers and classrooms across Atlanta, helping children arrive at school with the skills and confidence to learn.
It started with big faith and six words on a notebook page.
“If you can convince a child that you love them, and that they are smart,” she says, “you can teach them anything.”
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