Cornell has begun plans for a new child-care facility for faculty, staff and students. The center, for 158 children ages 5 and under, addresses a growing need for child care at Cornell and in the Tompkins County area.

The announcement follows the university being named to Working Mother magazine's 100 Best Employers for Working Mothers.

The planned facility will require new construction, with a tentative plan for opening sometime in late 2007 or early 2008. The site's location has yet to be announced.

"The university recognizes that to attract quality faculty and staff, it must meet the needs of its workforce, needs that are constantly evolving," said Cornell President David J. Skorton. "As the largest employer in the area, the university's needs for child care, particularly at infant and toddler levels, frequently exceeds availability. We are delighted that we are making this next step in achieving our goal of addressing the needs of our faculty, staff and students."

After requesting proposals for a company to manage the center, the university has selected Bright Horizons, an international company that provides employer-sponsored child care, early education and work/life solutions. Management details and Cornell's role in running the center will be worked out in the contract, said Lynette Chappell-Williams, director of the university's Office of Workforce Diversity, Equity and Life Quality in the Office of Human Resources.

Cornell's plan follows the lead of other major universities, including Dartmouth, Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Duke, who already have on-site or near-site child-care centers.

Cornell's Work and Family Advisory Council suggested in the early 1990s that child care on or near the campus would benefit the needs of faculty and staff, but at the time there was still adequate local child care available in the community.

"Recent state regulations have caused many smaller, family-operated facilities to close down in recent years," said Chappell-Williams.

Therefore, having an additional center that focuses on infant and toddler care has gone from a service that would be "nice to have, to a huge need," said Chappell-Williams. "Now, there is a shortage of care options in the community."

That shortage stems from a state law that went into effect Jan. 31, 2005, requiring that family and group day-care homes and child day-care centers obtain special permits to dispense medications and a 2001 law that requires fences or other barriers around any body of water on or adjacent to a day-care provider's property.

Cornell's planned child-care center also addresses a desire to build a critical mass of women faculty, especially in engineering and the sciences, and to make Cornell more appealing to new faculty hires to replace the large number of professors expected to retire over the next decade. The child-care facility adds to programs already in place at the university for faculty, staff and postdoctoral employees, including child-care expense assistance and financial assistance for domestic and international adoptions.

"Part of the motivation of this new center is that we have heard of faculty who have experienced challenges in finding child care here and we have lost them; they moved elsewhere," said Chappell-Williams. "There are also those who applied for positions at Cornell and then declined offers because child-care services appeared inadequate. The new center is designed to help with both the recruiting and retention of faculty and staff with children."

Child-care fees will be based on competitive local rates.