It’s fall, and the air is heavy with the scent of tempera finger paint, as children dip foraged leaves into the paint and affix them to white butcher paper. Their paintings burst with seasonal reds, oranges, yellows and browns. Down the hall, children scoop seeds out of pumpkins that were grown in a patch right outside of their classroom window.
The Ohio State University Child Care Program is celebrating its 50th year of providing high-quality, child-led care for the Ohio State community, including faculty, staff and students.
For Chrisse Edmunds, associate director of Ohio State’s Center for the Study of Student Life, and her husband, the child care program has supported their growing family as their careers progressed.
Both were graduate students and transplants to Ohio when their oldest daughter entered the program at 10 months old.
“We didn’t have any family in the area, so this became such a lifeline for us,” says Edmunds, who remembers cobbling together a rotating cycle of babysitters before her daughter enrolled in the program. Edmunds now has two more children at the center and appreciates the safe and welcoming environment, as well as the incredible bond her kids have formed with their teachers.
“I spend a lot of time there dropping kids off and picking them up from multiple classrooms,” Edmunds says. “I love seeing how invested the teachers and staff are in my entire family. The attention to detail they have to each of my kids has been amazing.”
In the classrooms teachers bring their own heartfelt approaches to early education within the program’s curriculum.
Pamela Keller, a teacher who has worked with 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds for the past 18 years, drew on her fine arts degree and her background in childhood education to develop a creative, open-ended approach to learning that’s always driven by the kids. In her preschool room, the outside world plays as big a role in learning as anything in the classroom.
Right outside the door of her classroom is a garden where children dig to plant seeds in the spring and watch snapdragons, pansies, spearmint, beans, and pumpkins grow through the summer and fall. They save seeds to plant the next year.
“Children typically stay in my room for two to three years, so they’ll see the plants come full circle,” Keller says.
A community from the start
The program got its start in 1972, when a group of faculty, staff and students all looking for child care came together, says program director Donald Fuzer.
In its earliest days, the program served 95 children out of a campus-area church. In 1987, the university opened a developmentally appropriate state-of-the-art facility designed to meet the program’s needs.
With a sliding-scale tuition system based on income, Ohio State is proud to offer this program through the Office of Human Resources.
And as society’s awareness of the importance of early-childhood education and brain development has grown, Fuzer says the program’s curriculum and educational approach has followed suit. These days, the program continues to run ahead of the curve by offering opportunities that set children up to succeed.
“What researchers have found is that if you don’t have a quality early-childhood education in those first five years, you’re losing out. That’s when the brain is beginning to make connections and functions,” he says.
Early in his tenure, Fuzer introduced a new research-based curriculum that sets milestones and tracks the academic growth of the kids. Known as “The Creative Curriculum,” it is based on five fundamental principles:
- Positive interactions and relationships with adults provide a critical foundation for successful learning.
- Social-emotional competence is a significant factor in school success.
- Constructive, purposeful play supports essential learning.
- Physical environment affects the type and quality of learning interactions.
- Teacher-family partnerships promote development and learning.
The standard curriculum is used even with the smallest babies served at the centers, says Beth Rodabaugh, who has been an infant teacher at the Ackerman center for 16 years. While older children paint with fingers and brushes, infants will enjoy the sensory benefits of playing with paint in a Ziploc bag.
“There’s nothing we can do with older ages that we can’t modify for infants,” Rodabaugh says.
The staff/child ratios within the program are lower than what the state allows, with one staff member each per four infants, six toddlers, 10 preschoolers and 12 kindergarten or school-age children.
The program also provides special support to help at-risk infants and toddlers through early intervention services. Depending on the need, occupational therapists, physical therapists and speech/language pathologists can work individually with children in the classroom, and teachers also collaborate with outside service providers for additional specialized care when needed.
Advantages of being on campus
Anne McDaniel, associate vice president for Strategy, Impact and Academic Partnerships, has two children who started in the infant room at 3 months old. The draw for McDaniel was the endorsement the child care program carries from the National Association for the Education of Young Children. It’s one of the few programs in Columbus that holds the national accreditation, among less than 10% nationwide. The program is also licensed by the State of Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.
Being on campus allows the program to support the university’s academic mission through learning opportunities for Ohio State students and faculty.
College students are currently employed as teaching aides, and students in programs ranging from education and human ecology to nursing and kinesiology are often granted access to classrooms for class projects, observations, field placements and research projects.
The center also offers a kindergarten program with a licensed teacher. Families have come to appreciate this offering as it’s an all-day program, with academics running from 8:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. and an option for students to stay on after school until evening pickup. Within the broader program, parents can choose from full-day, partial week and evening care.
The popularity of the program means that there’s a waitlist to join; staff encourage those who would like to enroll to fill out a waitlist application as soon as possible.
For working parents who are employees of the university, the child care program has proven to be a value-add when it comes to job satisfaction, Fuzer says. “There’s been research that shows that if your child is in a secure, healthy, safe facility, your productivity goes up.”
Edmunds concurs.
“I could not have finished my graduate program and I could not work full time now if I did not have this program,” she says. “Finding high-quality child care that you can really trust and feel so safe with is priceless.”