Sacramento City College was awarded a federally-funded grant in October for $224,000 as part of the Child Care Access Means Parents in School program (CCAMPIS) in efforts to support the services provided by child care centers on college campuses, which will be renewable annually for the next five years.
The Child Development Center at City College is a free service to income-eligible students, providing care for children while allowing parents to accomplish their educational goals. Historically, City College’s facility has provided care to children ages 2 to 6. With the grant, the center will now be able to accommodate infants and toddlers under 2 years old beginning in the spring semester of 2022.
In order to care for such young children, there are a multitude of requirements that must be met pertaining to care and setting.
“The state of California requires a different license,” said Laurie Perry, the early childhood development coordinator at City College. “You need different furniture, different food, and you also have a higher child-staff ratio. So part of what the grant will pay for is additional staff for younger children.”
Perry said she expects that the center will need to hire at least three assistants and one full-time caretaker. The center currently has the capacity of 35 full-time slots for children each semester.
The children younger than 2 will have both an indoor and outdoor area to play, separate from the older children. The grant will also pay for activities for the new incoming children.
Because you need an intensive care to defence the aftermath. shop levitra Our genital cialis canada wholesale area requires more blood supply comparatively to other parts of brain. Here The World’s Strongest Acai is considered a Healthful Alternative to tadalafil levitra . Technology lovers, especially the ones fond of using DSLR and other cameras, keep finding the viagra online canada latest cameras with all the features in order to capture the state.“We have an outside time where they can play outside on the playground, breakfast, lunch and an afternoon snack,” Perry said. “And then, of course, they’ll have all the activities you’d think of happening in preschool; they’ll have books, they’ll have play dolls, lots of different equipment to play with. We have a little tiny gym that has slides and stairs to crawl around on because their age likes to try to walk and crawl and run around.”
In addition to the expansion of the ages of children they will be able to serve, Amy Strimling, the center’s director, is creating a webpage on Canvas that will serve as a collective of resources for new parents.
“I am going to set up this Canvas site so that parents have a place to go for more information and for more resources,” said Strimling, the department chair and a professor in City College’s early childhood education department. “So it could be community resources; it could be the food distribution that we have on campus. It could be activities that are going on in the community, health fairs, those kinds of things. But more particularly, it’s going to be a place where parents can come to ask questions on infant development and child development. We’ll set up discussion boards like we would in classes, where parents can talk to each other.”
Expected to launch by the spring semester of 2022, the webpage on Canvas will provide plenty of resources and parenting strategies regarding topics such as potty-training, breastfeeding and nutrition, according to Strimling. It will also allow for a space in which parents can converse with one another and form a sense of community. Oftentimes, being a student parent can be not only challenging, but also very isolating, Strimling said.
The webpage and the expanded offerings of the child care center will, Strimling said, relieve some of the stress from the busy lives of student-parents of City College, allowing them to achieve their educational goals.
