New child-care center in Escondido Village set to open Sept. 2
BY MICHAEL PEÑA
When the first phase of a new campus child-care center opens for business Sept. 2, it will enroll as many as 100 children ranging in age from 8 weeks to 5 years.
Stanford Madera Grove Children's Center is a residential-style building on Olmsted Road at the northeast corner of Escondido Village. It joins three other centers on campus that provide full-time care: the Children's Center of the Stanford Community, the Stanford Arboretum Children's Center and Knowledge Beginnings Child Development Center.
Children's Creative Learning Centers (CCLC) manages all but the Children's Center of the Stanford Community, a nonprofit parent cooperative. The WorkLife Office, a department of Stanford Human Resources, oversees them.
Ample on-site childcare helps Stanford achieve the goal of attracting and retaining the best and the brightest scholars in higher education, said Teresa Rasco, director of the WorkLife Office. To that end, priority at Madera Grove will be given to applicants who are on the faculty, then to graduate students and postdoctoral scholars, and then to staff.
When the Stanford University Board of Trustees met last April, it approved preliminary plans for a second phase. The addition, which will cost an estimated $5.4 million, is expected to open in spring 2010 and accommodate another 100 children. (The plan is scheduled to return to the trustees for project and construction approval in December.)
The center's layout mirrors a two-story home and includes seven classrooms, a multipurpose room, a conference room for parents and office space for CCLC's regional director. The play area out back features a sand pit, jungle gym and landscaping—all surrounded by a tall fence and shaded by several large oak trees.
The house-like appearance of Madera Grove is modeled after CCLC's downtown Palo Alto center. The company, which has an office in Sunnyvale, operates more than 100 child-care centers nationwide and more than two dozen in California.
Stanford's Child Care Subsidy Grant Program provides as much as $5,000 a year to qualified employees with children under the age of 10. The benefit can be applied to childcare on or off campus.
"There are other schools that subsidize only the people that get to get into their centers. This is more broad," Rasco said. "The need is very big—not only at Stanford, but in the community. And that's one reason why Stanford has taken on more centers, because the community is so impacted and finding childcare is difficult."
A tally last spring showed that as many as 900 children were on the WorkLife Office's master waiting list for the three existing centers.
But parents often put themselves on multiple waiting lists, Rasco said. "You can go through five or six or seven or 10 people on a waiting list to fill one slot because they found other care, they're happy with somebody in their home," she said.
A separate waiting list has been established for Madera Grove. For more information, including a downloadable frequently asked questions document, visit http://worklife.stanford.edu.