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Child Study Center will not close at the University of Maine

Posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009, 12:00 am

It was in the plan. Employees and student workers braced themselves for the worst. The University of Maine’s Child Study Center was on the chopping block to help the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences chip away at its almost $1.4 million of the budget cuts. Not anymore.

Dean Jeff Hecker said in an e-mail that the center, which educates 35 kids from ages two-and-a-half to five-and-a-half, will remain open for another year.

“This will require a fee increase,” Hecker wrote. “VP for Finance Janet Waldron has helped us to identify enough funds to keep the center open through next year.”

The fee increase would be a tuition hike for the parents who use the center.

The child center will celebrate its 70th anniversary tomorrow. Its closing would have meant up to 35 families having to find new daycare, and two full-time employees losing their jobs.

Earlier this afternoon when asked what she would do if the center closed, Karen Belknap – a teacher at the center for 20 years – sighed deeply, “I can’t imagine not being here. I’m not going to imagine not being here.”

The child center employees 10 work-study students and works as a research center for 30 psychology students a year. Here the students observe the small children and watch how they learn and develop.

“What is your favorite letter?” mother Kelli Costello asked her son, Griffin. The 5-year-old mumbled and crossed his fingers – the sign language for “R.”

Griffin walked through the center. He pointed to dinosaur cut outs on the wall, each with a child’s name on them. The center has a theme every two weeks; right now it is the dinosaur theme. “Mine is in my cubby,” Griffin said from behind his blue glasses.

On the other side of the room, which is full of tiny chairs, two computers sit, shut off. These are for free time. Griffin likes playing the dinosaur games on the computers.

“As a parent you either get that feeling about a place or you don’t. We had that feeling since day one,” Kelli Costello said. This is the only daycare her son Griffin has ever been to. “This is a really special place,” Costello said, sitting in a bright yellow Lego chair as kids around her pieced together the Legos on the table.

Patricia Marquis, another mother whose child, Sophie, attends the daycare, said the center is convenient for her family. Her husband works on campus, and it is easy for him to swing by if anything goes wrong.

One-third of the center’s parents are faculty, another third are student families, and the last third are children from the community.

“It’s a very diverse group, which is very important to us,” Marquis said. “We also like that the psychology students are around.” She said the college students act as good role models for her three-and-a-half year old. “The interactions they have with the kids are amazing.”

The teacher-to-child ratio at the center is approximately one adult to two children.

“We can provide more attention to them,” said Director and head teacher Kevin Duplissie. Duplissie has worked in childcare at the university for 21 years. He said the longevity of the program helps prove its quality.

Some unique programs the center provides includes offering modern languages, and Duplissie said the teachers have the leeway to be creative in their teachings. This has allowed the children to help build the clubhouse in their playground, and hunt for dinosaur bones in the sandbox – an activity happening later this week.

“We’re able to look at things a little more creatively because of our staff,” Duplissie said. “We’re trying to get them to think abstractly.”

Duplissie illustrated this by telling a story where his class conducted an experiment to see which froze faster, hot or cold water. The class put two glasses outside in the snow. One of the glasses froze, but the water was tilted. When Duplissie asked why this was, a student said that the tilted glass was the hot water, because it melted the snow beneath it. “And that was from a three year old,” Duplissie said.

Marquis said these types of programs have “done wonders” for Sophie, expanding her vocabulary and sharing skills.

“I have a French background. To me that’s very important. That’s a good step forward. They are already that much more advanced, and you don’t see that in many other programs,” Marquis said about the center, which provides Spanish, French and sign language education for kids on a weekly basis.

The 70th anniversary of the Child Study Center is tomorrow, Tuesday April 14 at 4 p.m. in the Bodwell Lounge in the Collins Center for the Arts.