Tech’s Child Development Lab Planning Expansion

Tennessee Tech’s Child Development Lab is in the earliest stages of planning an expansion so they can better support local families.

Child Development Lab Director Angie Smith said they currently have a wait list of about 250 families looking to get their children into the program. Smith said they are looking to establish a long-term strategic plan.

“It’s just really difficult when families come in and they’re looking for childcare and we have to turn them away,” Smith said. “So we are hoping that an expansion would be very impactful to help alleviate the stress of not having childcare available for families.”

Smith said an expansion would also allow them to involve more students from the College of Education in order to better train them for their own careers. She said they try to serve families on a first come, first serve basis, but wait times vary greatly depending on the age of the children being applied for.

“If you have an infant on our waiting list, you know, we only, the ratios are one to four, and so we take in eight infants at a time as compared to sometimes twenty preschoolers,” Smith said. “So the waiting list does vary, it can anywhere from a year to a year and half, or possibly two to three years, unfortunately.”

Smith said the primary focus of the lab is to help train future educators while providing age-appropriate, high quality experiences to the children and students involved.

“It’s so important, that birth to three, and really that birth to eight I should say, is such a huge milestone of development for children,” Smith said. “And it’s so important for them to have those hands-on just practical, wonderful experiences early in life so that they are socially and emotionally prepared for schools.”

She said the lab also works with many other branches of Tech beyond the College of Education.

“We have worked with engineering, as they’ve made adaptive tools for children with special needs, we’ve worked with the nursing program on campus when they do their pediatric rotations, we’ve done several things with music and art,” Smith said. “Just about every college has had students either placed here for either work-study, scholarship workers, so we’ve had quite the variety of experiences.”