Welcome to The Children's Center

The Children's Center was created as an alternative to full time care. The need for short hour care was in demand for students who were not enrolled full time and could not afford to pay for hours not needed.

Supporters of the idea decided to take a poll to see how many students would support the idea of having a short hour care on campus, the results were overwhelming. Portland State students voted to increase their student fees to pay for the new campus child care center.

A sense of community was very prevalent as students with no children were willing to have fees increase in order to help their fellow students who were in need.

The population at the time was 20,000 students with the average age of 27.5. So after several years of planning the Children's Center opened its doors to 30 children of student, staff and faculty, on March 29th, 1999.

Sorry, your browser doesn't support Java(tm), Download from http://java.sun.com/

Philosophy

We believe that young children through active exploration in an environment that is rich in materials and opputunities to converse, socialize, work, play and negotiate with others. We continually strive to foster respect for and celebrate diversity in race and cultural, physical appearance and ability and family composition and life style. Our goal is to have children construct their own knowledge through exploration of a wide variety of materials. Giving them the ability to explore as active participants. We feel that children should be placed first above everything. We value the diversity in ethnic, culture, physical apperance and ability, family composition and life style is well respected and celebrated. We want the children and their families to know that as teachers we recognize the process of their work as well as the product.

Our program's goal is to have every child and family feel welcome and supported. We do better than a 1:10 teacher - child ratio in our pre-school and 1:4 teacher - child ratio in our toddler class; in compliance with state standards. This allows us to spend quality time with your child, developing closer bonds of care, trust and respect.

Our goal is to have every child and family feel welcome and supported in our program.