Rice Children’s Campus welcomes first students

Rice Children’s Campus welcomes first students

BY JENNIFER EVANS AND B.J. ALMOND
Rice News staff

When Greg Marshall drives up to the new Rice Children’s Campus in his “Mr. Mom minivan” each morning, he and 4-year-old daughter Rowan escort 10-month-old daughter Brenna to her classroom, and then Rowan skips and dances down the hall to her own classroom. “She just cannot wait to get there,” said Marshall, director of university relations in Public Affairs. “After her second day, she spontaneously popped up and said, ‘I love my new school.'”

Marshall loves it as well. He no longer has to fight downtown traffic in a rush to pick up his daughters at a day care center there that closes at 6 p.m.

“Now I drop them off a block from campus and can get from my office to their classroom in 10 minutes flat,” he said. “And the grocery store and dry cleaner are now on the way home, so this new arrangement works better for our family.”

		Greg Marshall, director of university relations in Public Affairs, escorts his two daughters, Brenna, 10 months, and Rowan, 4, to their classrooms at the new Rice Children’s Campus. JEFF FITLOW

Also appealing to Marshall is the campus’s operating calendar, which is very similar to Rice’s. “The previous day care school we used would take off all the dates that HISD took off, and frequently those did not match up with Rice’s holiday schedule,” he said. “My wife and I were having to take upward of two weeks of personal time every year for day care at home. Now we’re able to work more and conserve our benefit time for when we really need it.”

Located at 5504 Chaucer Drive, the campus opened Sept. 29 and is Rice’s first early learning facility for children of Rice faculty, staff and students. The facility is licensed to provide care to children from ages 6 weeks to 5 years. Fifty students are currently enrolled, and many more children are expected to enroll in the next two months.

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One of those students is 4-year-old Raven Shamoo, daughter of Yousif Shamoo, director of Rice’s Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering and associate professor of biochemistry and cell biology.

Raven’s dad likes the feeling of being welcome on the campus. “Some schools push the parents out as soon as they drop off their kids, but the staff here is more sympathetic to the goodbye period in the morning,” Shamoo said. “Sometimes Raven and I will have breakfast together at the campus. I can sit there while she eats her yogurt.”

Shamoo was impressed to see that the staff knows all the kids’ names. “It’s obvious that they’ve worked really hard to create a very friendly greeting environment,” said Shamoo, who plans to also enroll his 2-year-old daughter, Devin, in the spring.

“Operations at the Rice Children’s Campus are going exceptionally well,” said Aaron Carrara, vice president of the Center for Early Childhood Education, the Houston-based organization that operates the facility. “I can’t emphasize enough how easily the children, families and staff have adjusted to the new school. We have a dynamic group of children and families, and we look forward to growing with them and supporting them for many years to come. Our organization has been in this business for 22 years, so we’re confident that the Rice Children’s Campus will serve as a model early childhood education program for the Houston community.”

When the campus opened its doors two weeks ago, Jou Jou Zebdaoui was among the proud and misty-eyed who watched their babies experience the first day of school. Zebdaoui’s baby, though, was brick-and-mortar. She was the project manager overseeing construction of the children’s campus.

“It was very exciting,” she said. “The building looked great. The kids were very happy. Everything went smoothly.”

Although the opening of the children’s campus was delayed by several unanticipated factors, it is the realization of almost two decades of discussion about a center to meet an important need for the Rice community.

“We see the children’s campus as an extension of our own goals — fostering a sense of community with our faculty, staff and students, providing excellent educational opportunities and meeting the needs of our community,” said Mary Cronin, associate vice president for Human Resources.

“Like Rice University, the Rice Children’s Campus will not only provide an excellent education to our youngest members, but also a nurturing environment for the students and their families. We expect that the children’s campus will help us in the recruitment of highly qualified faculty, staff and students. We are looking forward to this first year and the many years to come.”

The curriculum is based on the Montessori method, and each classroom environment is equipped to facilitate learning in five key areas: math, language, science, sensory development and everyday living skills. The children’s campus is licensed by the Texas Child Care Licensing Department; the staff expects that the children’s campus will achieve National
Association for the Education of Young Children accreditation within the first two years of operation and that the campus will be a member school of the American Montessori Society.

Designed by Taft Architects, the children’s campus is a single-story, 9,750-square-foot building with two playgrounds, nine classrooms, a Zen garden and safe play spaces. Staff members park in the nearby Greenbriar Annex Lot to avoid using the neighborhood’s on-street parking and the campus parking lot for parents.

“The space inside the Rice Children’s Campus is huge and wonderful,” Zebdaoui said. “The architects (Rice’s own John Casbarian, associate dean of architecture, and Danny Samuels, the Harry K. Smith Visiting Professor of Architecture) was very generous with the space and kept future growth in mind.” It’s not the only aspect of the future that was considered. The building was constructed using green building practices and, like all new Rice buildings, has been built to meet Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards. LEED is a rating system from the U.S. Green Building Council that recognizes energy efficiency, water savings, use of green materials, good indoor air quality and sustainable site development. The children’s campus will be among only a handful of LEED-certified schools in Texas.

Among the green features are an 8,000-gallon, underwater rain-harvesting tank that collects water that will be used to irrigate the native trees and plants designed by landscape architect Harry Dill, a roofline designed with a unique angle to flood the classrooms with natural light, odor-free and zero volatile organic compound paints and other materials, and a self-monitoring mechanical system to maximize energy efficiency. The building also used reclaimed materials from the old houses “deconstructed” to make way for the facility. About 10,000 bricks from those buildings were incorporated into the fa