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New child care center offers convenience and comfort for students and parents After years of planning, building, and preparing, the University has its first on-campus child care center. The LSU Child Care Center offers convenience for students, staff, and faculty who have young children. The center welcomes children between the ages of six weeks and five years. "The need for having child care on campus is far greater than it ever has been before," said Laura Leach, member of the LSU Board of Supervisors, who researched and helped initiate the idea of offering on-campus child care. Parents who spend their days on the LSU campus will find the Child Care Center's location convenient. The building sits behind the CEBA parking lot off of Gourrier Ave., near the corner of Burbank Drive and Nicholson Drive.
Mary Sciaraffa, the center's director, said the purpose of the new facility is to provide a much-needed service to the parents in the LSU community. The Child Care Center practices an open-door policy, which encourages parents to drop by at any time to see their children. This allows LSU students, staff, and faculty to easily visit between classes and on lunch breaks. Sciaraffa said this is important because it allows the busy parents to spend quality time with their children. The center is open from 7:15 a.m. to 5:15 p.m. Monday through Friday to accommodate the campus' daytime operating hours. The low child-teacher ratio at the center not only offers the children more assistance, but also provides more support for the faculty. The center plans to enroll about 150 children under the age of five each year.
Sciaraffa said the Child Care Center offers more than an average child care facility. Instead of strictly providing day care for the children, it also offers well-trained teachers in each classroom who introduce children to new ways of learning. The Child Care Center follows a developmentally appropriate curriculum. Teachers are not required to teach a set curriculum, which Sciaraffa said will allow them to engage the children with innovative teaching strategies and hands-on learning experiences. Each teacher has the freedom to base her lessons on the children she is teaching. Nadira Hussain, the teacher of a two-year-old class, said the center not only accommodates the children, but also the teachers. The building's architects put a lot of ingenuity and creativity into the design of the project. The classrooms in the building are connected in pairs and only separated by half walls. Between the two sets of half walls is a teacher work area and a bathroom. The half walls allow teachers to talk to each other throughout the day. Sciaraffa said it is important for teachers to have social support from other adults during the day. Hussain said the half walls give her the comfort of having easy access to someone on her level.
"Children learn through play," Sciaraffa said. "The more we can get them engaged with their senses, the better." She said the University's Panhellenic Council, the governing organization for all the University sororities, has adopted the playground as its philanthropy. The group chose the Child Care Center as a project that will bring all of the sororities together and possibly provide the women in the student organizations with the opportunity to get more directly involved with the children. Sciaraffa said the Child Care Center will serve many purposes at LSU and will benefit the campus in several different ways. It will act as both a recruiting and retention tool. "It will add family friendliness to LSU," Sciaraffa said. "It will lend the message that LSU is family-oriented and we want to help students, faculty, and staff with young children. It is our goal to become an integral part of LSU." Contact Laura Patz | LSU
University Relations
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Some of the newest students on LSU's campus may prefer building blocks and toy kitchen sets to construction management and human ecology classes, but they are getting the same enthusiastic welcome from the University community.
"One of the biggest benefits for the parents is the ease in their minds that their children are nearby," Leach said. 
Sciaraffa said the center uses a priority system for accepting students. Children of LSU students, staff members, and faculty members are accommodated first. The center then accepts the children of people with secondary affiliations with the University. This includes the grandchildren of faculty, staff, and students and the children of alumni. The last priority goes to people who have no direct affiliation with LSU. 
The only aspect of the original design that is not yet complete is the playground. Behind the new building, two plastic playhouses currently sit where a beautiful and functional playground eventually will invite children to learn about the outdoors. The plan for the playground includes a fishing pond, climbing structure, vegetable garden, and several other areas where children can get excited about learning. Sciaraffa said the "outdoor learning environment" will be a sensory experience.
