Child and Family Studies laboratory to move off campus

Run-down brick houses, multi-colored graffiti and a corner store advertising beer and wine flank Summit Street as it enters the Weinland Park area of Columbus. These, and other like conditions, do not lend themselves to be a positive environment for children.

But come winter 2007, the Ohio State University's A. Sophie Rogers Laboratory for Child and Family Studies, which provides a play-based curriculum for children newborn to five years old, will be moving to the low-income neighborhood as part of a plan to expand the research facility and to improve the neighborhood as a whole.

"We're working with the City of Columbus and Columbus Parks and Recreation to make changes in the park so that hopefully it will become a place where the community wants to be and place the community wants to use," said Michele Sanderson, program director for the A. Sophie Rogers Laboratory School.

The new pre-school, which will open its doors to students beginning January 2007, will be located on the corner of Summit Street and Seventh Avenue, adjacent to the new Weinland Park Elementary school that is currently being built, Sanderson said.

The Weinland Park area is bounded by 11th Avenue in the north, 5th Avenue in the south and St. Claire Avenue westward up to High Street.

"(Weinland Park) was a natural place for us to go," she said. "We had been feeling that we wanted to be serving a broader socioeconomic population of children than we do currently at the laboratory school, so it was just a natural choice for us."

The Rogers research program will be partnering with Columbus Public Schools and Head Start, a federally-funded program that targets low-income, pre-school-aged children. The Franklin County Board of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities will also be a partner, Sanderson said.

"It will provide a unique opportunity to work with a broader diversity of children of families in terms of our research agenda and professional development agenda. Because of it, we will be open to and cover a broad income range of families, including those in the Weinland Park community," said Dennis Sykes, director of early childhood systems in the college of human ecology.

The current program costs $770 per month for toddlers and infants and $625 per month for pre-school children. Because of the broader range of income the new facility will serve, however, it will probably charge families on a sliding scale, Sanderson said.

According to the 1999 U.S. Census, 54.6 percent of families in the Weinland Park area were below the poverty level. The university area, where more than half of the current program's families live, has 17.2 percent of families living below the poverty line.

The median family income for the Weinland Park area in 1999 was $11,379, compared with $28,304 in the university area.

Details about how the enrollment process will work and exactly how much it will cost to go there are still being worked out between the partnerships, Sanderson said.

"Because we're a research facility for the university we try to balance for age, gender and cultural diversity," she said.

The current lab school, located on the first floor of Campbell Hall, serves as an observation and research facility for the community, but the majority of observers are human development and family science majors, Sanderson said. The lab school move to Weinland Park will also benefit and expand the opportunity for observation and research of childhood development.

Amy Fanning, a 22-year-old senior in human development and family science, said the lab school provides hands-on experience for her major that she could not learn from a textbook.

However, Fanning also said that the current program, which only accepts 30 children, could definitely benefit itself and the community by expanding.

The current program has two classrooms, one for infants and toddlers, ages newborn to three, and one for pre-schoolers, ages three to five. The new school will have seven classrooms, three for infants and toddlers and four for pre-school-aged children, for a total of 88 children. Children in both age groups will be blended from all four partnership programs in all seven classrooms, Sanderson said.

"One of our main reasons for being in existence is to be a model child-care program where we can try out new ideas based on research, what we know in current research, try out cutting-edge ideas in child-care programming and then report back to the community on how that works in the laboratory school," Sanderson said.