For a number of students, employees and faculty, childcare services have been an essential part of balancing both work and parenting. Notre Dame’s Early Childhood Development Center (ECDC) offers childcare throughout the academic year.
The ECDC program at Saint Mary’s, located in Havican Hall, welcomes families unaffiliated with Notre Dame or Saint Mary’s. The ECDC program at Notre Dame, located between McCourtney Hall and the Undergraduate Community at Fischer, serves only students, alumni and employees.
At the moment, the Notre Dame ECDC location serves children ages two through kindergarten while the Saint Mary’s site operates as a preschool for 3- to 5-year olds. In its entirety, the ECDC enrolls a total of 272 children across part-time and full-time programs.
The ECDC’s mission of serving families has been a multi-decade endeavor. The first ECDC site was established in 1974 at Saint Mary’s by a small group of students and faculty looking to develop a safe environment for the children of building and maintenance service staff.
Since then, the ECDC has developed into an accredited nonprofit organization and expanded to create a second location on Notre Dame’s campus 30 years ago.
The ECDC has experienced a number of changes that naturally came with the program’s expansion. Kari Alford, the executive director of the ECDC, has been at the center for 29 years and noted the change in staff numbers as well as each site’s age groups.
“A couple of the big changes that we’ve seen are [that] we have expanded the number of teachers that we have on site so that we have an additional teacher in every classroom to provide support for children,” Alford said. “We have changed age groups at the Saint Mary’s site. Now we have kindergarten only at the Notre Dame site.”
While at the sites, children have the opportunity to engage in a variety of learning activities. Loree Greenwood serves as one of the co-lead teachers and oversees the daily activities for the children in her group. Along with foundational activities such as reading and singing songs with the children, Greenwood emphasized the importance of helping students to develop their learning skills.
“We are trying to prepare them for their next role in childhood,” Greenwood said. “Because a lot of our four-year-olds will go into kindergarten, we try to help them form those relationships and those conflict resolution skills. At the same time, we do try to get them educationally prepared for kindergarten with letters, numbers [and] patterns.”
In addition to the ECDC teachers, the children at the center also interact with college student volunteers who help to facilitate the learning process. College students typically work with other ECDC professional teachers to provide support and complete basic daily tasks.
“We are very fortunate to have college students in different roles here in this school,” Greenwood said. “Student volunteers help us by simply interacting with the children, doing simple tasks that we need done throughout the day, even if something is easy, [such as] watching the children in the hallway where they return from the bathroom, or watching them get a drink of water throughout the day. They’re invaluable.”
A number of parents expressed their gratitude for the ECDC. ECDC board member Neetu Agrawal, the Saint Mary’s ECDC elected parent representative, and Marc Osherson, an assistant professor at Notre Dame, expressed their positive feelings about how the ECDC has provided care for their five-year-old daughter, Adele. They discussed how the ECDC helped to ease the transition for their daughter when they moved from Newark to South Bend two years ago.
“For Adele, I think she was having big emotions for a little person leaving her home in Newark, and when she started school at ECDC, it was an easy transition,” Agrawal said. “She was happy to be there … [and] the teachers are loving. It made our transition here easy knowing that we didn’t have to worry about her.”
Agrawal and Osherson also discussed how the center provides opportunities for children to discover their individual interests.
“There’s the opportunity to do lots of classes,” Osherson said. “For Adele, [it has been] programs like soccer, gymnastics and dance … We can commit to a little two week to three week trial, and then Adele has been able to tell us what she likes.”
Alford shared that the ECDC hopes to continue pushing forward their mission by developing more resources to help students with special needs while also finding best practices to support students.
“Our goal is to keep providing excellence in early childcare and education and a great learning experience for our college students,” Alford said. “I think our constant challenge is being up on what we consider best practices, because we just keep learning more and more about brain research and how children learn best.”
