Campus children's center - Our History

The Campus Children’s Center, Inc. is a private, not for profit corporation founded in 1983. The corporation is dedicated to the high quality care and education of children and their families. We have a strong history of continually responding to the ever-changing needs of our families and the community we serve. Our programs enroll more than three hundred families each year and have developed a reputation for providing exceptional care to the families we assist.

Our corporation has evolved through the years, from our conception as a single child care center to its current status that includes three early childhood programs and school aged care programs. The early childhood centers are designed for children aged eight weeks through five years, the holiday care program for children aged five through twelve years, and the summer camp for children completing kindergarten through completion of eighth grade.

The Campus Children's Center Inc. was founded by a group of New York state employees who were desperate for work site child care for their children. These individuals joined together to begin the process of establishing an early childhood center in the Fall of 1981. At long last, on November 1, 1983 the doors to the Campus Children's Center were opened with approximately sixty-eight children. Through the years, the program continued to grow and strengthen to its current enrollment of eighty-one early years children. This program has a licensed capacity for 105 children. This includes sixteen infants, twenty toddlers, forty-five preschool aged children and twenty-four school aged children on school breaks.

In the early nineties, we began to see the need for high quality care for school aged children. We responded to this need by creating our Summer Fling camp. This camp began with 24 children in the summer of 1993. The following year, 1994, we formed a partnership with the University at Albany and established a second site for the Summer Fling program. This new arrangement allowed us to provide summer care for up to 48 school aged children. The Summer Fling program continued to expand in numbers and age range. It currently provides care for up to one hundred and four children per week. These children range in age from completing kindergarten through the completion of eighth grade. These programs are runs as summer camps.

Our partnership with the University at Albany led to development of the U-Kids Child Care Center. This child care center officially opened its doors on January 24, 1995. This program has a licensed capacity for 57 children and includes eight infants, ten toddlers, and thirty-nine preschool aged children. This program has met with great success at the University.

Over the years, we began working with an increasing number of children with special needs. We welcomed and have collaborated with many different agencies in order to ensure services to meet the more complex needs of these children. Our experiences with these children and their therapists combined to allow us to establish some of our classrooms as integrated programs.

In the Summer of 2000 we began collaborating with Capital District Beginnings and set up our first New York State Department of Education identified integrated classroom. Our current integrated classrooms can accommodate a maximum of ten special needs children. However, in addition to these classrooms, all of our rooms may have at any point in time one or several children receiving itinerant therapy.

Our corporation has continued to expand with the addition of the DSS Day Inc. Child Care Center (dba/ Ten Eyck Tykes.) Early in 2001, representatives from the Family Benefits Committee of the Governor's Office of Employee Relations approached us and proposed merging the Campus Children's Center, Inc. with Ten Eyck Tykes. Following negotiations, an operating agreement was signed and on June 18, 2001 we assumed control of the Ten Eyck Tykes child care program. This merger was completed in September of 2002.

Our philosophy encompasses caring not only for the children, but enabling the entire family structure to be strengthened. In the past we have held parenting workshops, enrichment programs for children and their families and we are currently in the process of building our resource libraries for our families.

Our programs have earned an excellent reputation for providing exceptional services. Many of our families return to us when they need care for successive children, continual care for school aged children, and when they need support and advice.