Yuba Community College District’s (YCCD) Child Development Centers (CDC) are an essential part of student life. They include the Marysville Preschool, Marysville Infant Toddler center, Woodland center, and the Clear Lake center.
The centers serve three primary purposes for students: They provide care for children of students so they may take classes, they provide lab credit for Early Childhood Education (ECE) students, and they offer paid work experience hours for ECE students.
If the CDCs were to close, student parents would no longer be able to meet their goals as easily. ECE majors would also be unable to meet their goals because their lab requirements can only be met at the Woodland, Clearlake, and Marysville centers. Most importantly, children who benefit from these pre-elementary educational institutions would have to go somewhere else and the parents of these children might suffer long wait lists and steep tuition and enrollment fees.
Thankfully, according to Ed Davis, Yuba College’s Dean of Early Childhood Education, these CDCs are not in danger of closing, moving, or losing funding, despite recent rumors stemming from an overview report written by Laurie Sheuermann, the director of the CDCs. In fact, Mr. Davis says the district has allowed two new people to be hired for the CDCs and afternoon programs at Clear Lake are being expanded to include more time for the children, which means more time for the parents.
Currently, the CDCs, which are accredited by the National Association for Education of Young Children (NAEYC) and have been for the past three years, are licensed for 133 children. YCCD students have priority over other families in the community who wish to seek child care at these facilities, and will comprise 43% to 68.8% of the families enrolled.
The California Department of Education (CDE) has provided the CDC’s main funding since the 1996/1997 school year. State Preschool and General Child Care are the two main contracts contributing to the July 1st – June 30th funding cycle. The CDCs have twenty-one permanent employees and must employ a child to teacher ratio of 1 staff member for every 4 children aged 18 to 36 months and a ratio of 1 staff member for every 8 children aged 3 to 5 years according to CDE guidelines.
Anyone who wishes to follow the progress of the CDCs may attend public meetings held by the Yuba College Council. (These are usually held Friday afternoons in room 303 of Yuba College campus).
For now, the CDC remains a valuable and permanent part of our community and hopefully it will continue to grow as the YCCD remains the primary local transfer college.
My name is Aaron Thomas Leonard Piccirillo. I was born in Jamestown, NY, but I grew up in Homer City, PA. I have been living in California for about 12 years and I am working on my fifth AA (anthropology, song writing, English, art, and general education). I love swimming, biking, hiking, reading, writing, traveling,and home cooking. Mostly, I love to write about arts and entertainment, but I also like to write investigative stories.
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