It is planned to launch in the Flagstaff Middle School building in March, with two pilot classrooms that will have room for 25 children between 3 and 5 years old. Priority for the first placements will go to NAU students and faculty, though the goal is to expand the space eventually to serve the wider Flagstaff community.

The program recently received a $1.8 million C-CAMPIS (Child Care Access Means Parents in School) grant to provide tuition scholarships, pay teachers and purchase materials over the next four years.

The majority of that funding is expected to go toward scholarships for undergraduate, masters and doctoral students who meet financial Pell eligibility requirements — which will pay between 75% and 100% of tuition for their children to attend.

“The goal there is that they basically don’t have to worry about the cost of care and they’ll also have their children at the highest-quality site in the area,” said Tori Damjanovic, COE assistant professor and principal investigator.

Eventually, Damjanovic said, the plan is to expand to include kids between the ages of 1 and 5 in a space on NAU’s campus. Flagstaff has a higher need for care for 1- and 2-year-olds, she said.

“For those younger ages there’s just not a lot available,” she said.

Rather than a daycare, the center will be a “teacher education lab school,” where teachers provide research-based best practices and serve as mentors to students in the university’s early childhood education blended unified program.

The center is meant to serve several purposes, Damjanovic said: providing high-quality childcare close to campus for students, faculty and staff, a place for teachers and pre-service teachers to see best practices in action, a way to provide resources for both community members and teachers in training as well as a space where other NAU programs can collaborate on research.

“Hopefully at some point we’ll be a resource center for the whole community for special education, resources,” she said. “ … We’ll be getting the best of the best and really show what good teaching in early childhood looks like.” Damjanovic added: “It’s going to be a hub where people can not only see research-based practices, but it’s also going to be a site to help people in the community with young children. … If they need screenings or if they need resources about things available in Flagstaff for families, we’ll be a site for that. I think it really has a lot of layers of importance to the community.”

Teachers at the school are required to have at least a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education and will participate in regular classroom professional development to ensure the students are getting the best care possible.

As Damjanovic described it, the ideal staff member “really values children” and “is really open to learning new things.”

NAU COE faculty will be helping with the higher-education elements.

They will be seeking NAEYC (National Association for the Education of Young Children) accreditation for the center (one of the highest available for early childhood), keeping low classroom ratios and recently hired Rebecca Cirzan as the center’s director.

The center is also meant as a research site for programs across campus, with students ranging from dental to athletics to science might bring their subjects into the classroom. Speech and language students might make a visit to practice conducting hearing evaluations or speech therapy, for example.

The college education aspect will include classroom observation and student teaching (one per classroom), taking a “phase in approach” that depends on the student’s level of experience. This could progress from observations through larger group teachings to eventually working at the center after graduation, Damjanovic provided as an example.

“I hope that it gives [our NAU students] some really great role models to look at what a classroom space should look like,” she said. “I hope they take that into the field once they graduate and it changes the way in which they teach, wherever they end up teaching.”

This part of the program is set to start in the fall.

For the early learners the program will take a project-based approach that which focuses on projects using topics the kids are interested in and combining multiple areas of study, instead of teaching subjects on their own. Faculty in NAU’s COE are developing the curriculum based on their experience in the field.

“You’re studying something that they’re really interested in and then you’re folding in math, science, social studies, literacy. But it’s all real-life experiences and hands on,” Damjanovic explained of the project approach. “Just like as adults when we do things, we remember them and we learn more; it’s that same approach but with young children. There’s going to be a really strong focus on the materials and they’re going to be fantastic, very naturalistic.”

The program also has a focus on special education, serving as a model of a combined classroom. Students in NAU’s blended unified program earn a dual degree in early childhood and special education.

“In Flagstaff, there’s just not a lot of spaces available for children with varying abilities,” Damjanovic said. “So we wanted to have one, make sure we provided that, but also done in a really high-quality way with really highly trained teachers.”

NAU has been trying to develop a childcare program for at least 30 years, Damjanovic said, but hurdles had repeatedly caused setbacks.

This iteration came from a conversation between dean Ramona Mellott and NAU President Jose Luis Cruz Rivera about a year ago, leading to the creation of a committee including Damjanovic, Mellott, department of teaching and learning associate professor Jon Lee and COE associate dean Pam Powell, among others.

In May, they found available space in Flagstaff Middle School, allowing them to start making plans. Hearing they had gotten the C-CAMPIS grant in September let the team to start developing the specifics needed to open the center this spring.

Damjanovic hopes the program would provide a model classroom space for aspiring teachers as well as an educational foundation for its students.

“I think it will be great [for the children] because they’re going to get a great developmental preschool education that I believe will give them a great start,” she said. “ … We want them to build their self-esteem, their social-emotional learning, not just academic skills, but then really become critical thinkers and problem solvers — which will help them succeed later in school and life.”

A website for the program is underway. It includes an intake form for families to apply to enroll their kids (aged 3 to 5) in the program. Only 25 spaces are available in the first class, with NAU students, faculty and staff as priorities.