Unfortunately, we began realizing how expensive it is to provide high-quality toddler care. For a time, from 1991 to 1996, we had a program for children from 18 months old to young 3-year-olds in our renovated basement. We opened the kindergarten in 1983 in response to parents’ need for full-time kindergarten, and renovated the second floor of the building for that purpose. I had studied child development in England and had been teaching at the neighboring Foote School for three years. I was hired to become a teacher in 1975 because Kitty Lustman and the rest of the board at Calvin Hill decided the place really needed to be a school, with structure, governance, and a curriculum.
#Nancy close yale child study center professional#
We now have 60 kids in three programs - one for 3-year-olds, one for 4-year olds, and the kindergarten - and we have a professional staff of 17. When I became director in 1976, it was still a small program: There were 24 kids and 4 teachers, along with me. Thomas More Chapel, but the founders were promised the neighborhood firehouse on Highland Street, and the operation moved into the first floor of the converted firehouse in 1972. On the evolution of Calvin Hill Day Care Center & Kitty Lustman-Findling Kindergarten: The center first opened in St. The following are some of Horwitz’s reflections. On a recent December afternoon, amidst the sounds of 5-year-olds happily (sometimes noisily) playing with wooden blocks, Horwitz talked with YaleNews about her long career at Calvin Hill Day Care.
With Yale clinician and educator Nancy Close, she co-teaches two courses - “Language, Literacy, and Play” and “Child Development” - as well as her own course, “Theory and Practice of Early Childhood Education.” All are popular among undergraduates. While the sight and sound of bustling children will no longer be a part of Horwitz’s daily life, she will continue to teach undergraduates about early childhood education and child development. Those who worked with Horwitz have described her over the years as a “legend” in the field of early childhood education and care, and parents of current or former attendees of Calvin Hill Day Care & Kitty Lustman-Findling Kindergarten (the latter became part of the center in 1983) often describe the center as a place where “magic” happens. I doubt any of us in 1971 anticipated that the center would have such an impact.” “The last time I was at Calvin Hill, Carla and her successor were giving a tour of the facility to education professionals from the People’s Republic of China. “We hoped that the center would have a positive impact on families in the Yale-New Haven community, but through Carla’s leadership the center has become a nationally and internationally respected model for early childhood education,” says Schmoke. They founded Calvin Hill Day Care Center and named it after a member of the Class of 1969 who was a star football player at Yale and later went on to an NFL career. He and other undergraduates knew of the union members’ needs for day care. One of the students was Kurt Schmoke ’71, former mayor of Baltimore who is now president of the University of Baltimore. With the support of the university administrators, the students set up child care, soup kitchens, and other services for the throngs of people who came into New Haven for the protests. Members of the employee union Local 35 had gone on strike, and in May 1970 the murder trials of Black Panther Party members were taking place in New Haven. Students from Davenport College founded the Calvin Hill Day Care Center during a time of campus unrest. Day care was considered a social service the idea that day care could be a place of learning was pretty uncommon.”īack then, Horwitz never envisioned that the center, originally founded by a group of Yale undergraduates in 1970 to serve the children of union employees, would become a model for what “day care” at its best can be. Predominately, poorer children were in day care. Those with means sent their children part-time to nursery school, or their children were taken care of by family members. “There weren’t that many professional women working at the university. “When I began here, first as a teacher in 1975 and then as director a year later, day care had a whiff of the ‘custodial’ around it,” she explains. Today, parents vie for spots for their children at the day care center, but there was a time when “day care” was “practically a dirty word,” recalls Horwitz, who retired as director of the center in December. For 40 years, Carla Horwitz listened to the laughter and conversation of young children as they gathered for play, classroom activities, meals, and more in the converted firehouse that is home to the Calvin Hill Day Care Center.
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