The Rice Thresher

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January 19, 2007 > News > Rice-owned daycare center will serve employees, students

Rice-owned daycare center will serve employees, students

By Alex Dinur | Thresher staff

In a year and a half, Rice employees and students will be able to drop off their children at a daycare center a block from campus.

Scheduled for completion at the beginning of the 2008-‘09 academic year, the center will serve faculty, staff and students with small children from infancy to five years of age. The one-story, 9,500 square foot building will have 9 classrooms and capacity for 84 children.

Rice will hire a private childcare company to run the daycare, which will be built on land Rice already owns on Chaucer Street. President David Leebron organized two committees to recommend how and where to build the facility — a committee on faculty women’s child care and a faculty and staff infant care benefits committee.

Committee on Faculty and Staff Benefits co-chair Yousif Shamoo said childcare has been a concern since 1990, but nothing had been done about it until now.

“The building of the daycare facility is just another part of President Leebron’s vision of making Rice one of the premier research institutions in the country where every concern of the faculty and students is considered,” Shamoo, a biochemistry and cell biology professor, said.

Shamoo said most academics usually have children when they are between 24 and 38. At those ages, however, many are also finishing graduate school or trying to gain tenure. Shamoo said he sympathizes with students who have small children and who may not be able to afford childcare. Such students would benefit from a Rice-affiliated center, he said.

According to an article in the Rice News, the tuition for the center will be similar to that of other area daycares.

Earth Science Professor Carrie Masiello said the daycare center is important because it will help Rice compete more effectively with schools like Stanford, Duke and those in the Ivy League. The center will also help graduate and undergraduate students with children to continue their education.

“It’s important for Rice to find and hire the right faculty,” Masiello, who served on the ad hoc committee on childcare, said. “Concerns of the candidates for their children should not hold them back from coming to Rice.”

Masiello said the center’s 84 spots should fill up quickly because parents will recognize Rice’s name.

“The waiting list for the daycare center at Caltech, where I used to teach, was two years,” she said. “I think people just wanted to be able to tell others, ‘My kids are at Caltech!’ They see the name and affiliation of the center as a status symbol, and I know that people from Houston respect the Rice name a lot.”

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