Melrose Daycare is one of several Child Care Centers in the Tucson area that offers high quality infant care in a warm, nurturing environment. Each year, the Center is renovated to offer a fresh new environment for our children. Our state-of-the art center prides itself on its being "child centered". The focus is not only on our children but on developing strong relationships between each member of the Center staff and each individual child. With a high-quality program, this is a challenge we are up to every day!
This past summer, we opened a new building for our daycare program, which is called the Learning Village. Although it is much smaller than our main facility, it is just as much fun! Our infant care staff is very happy with the growth and expansion of their building and are always looking for ways to improve our child care services.
One particular area of growth that the Learning Village experienced was that of the amount of older toddler room space. In the past, our day care facility was limited to only having a single infant room for our children, while our larger Early Intervention/First Steps Program offered an infant/child room and an office for our social workers. As our community grew, our needs started to expand to include an additional early childhood unit and a full-time child care unit. Due to the added cost associated with these two different child care units, we had to make some difficult choices. Fortunately, we were able to save money through the purchase of a new building and a full time social worker.
Now that our community has a new building, we have a lot more space! Our social workers are thrilled with all of the new rooms. We now have an early childhood unit for our social workers and our social worker contracted a full time child care unit. This has worked well for us so far, but we have had to make a few changes to streamline the hiring process. While we have not changed the ratio of workers to babies in our nursery, we have started looking at the total number of children in each bed to make sure we are not overstating. It is definitely an area of focus for us as we enter our 2nd year.
Another change has been in the number of early intervention services that are offered in our facility. We continue to offer a full time social work team and early intervention services for all of our babies. As many parents know, the majority of babies in our center are not born into our program but come in due to low birth weight or because of high anxiety. We have always felt that these babies should be paired with an infant specialist who would pair them with a social worker who has the expertise and skills to support these unique cases. With the addition of a social worker who is dedicated to early intervention as well as a full time social work team dedicated to these early intervention/first steps programs, we felt that we could no longer continue to staff our center with two social workers and a midwife per floor.
As a result of this reallocation, we have begun to partner with several other social work agencies across the city and have opened two early intervention programs that are funded through one agency and paired with one social worker from each agency. In addition to our early intervention/first steps programs, we have also started to partner with several home health care agencies to provide additional supportive services to our clients. This has allowed us to expand our early intervention programs and meet the unique needs of babies entering our facility.
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