How should a home-based child-care provider set up a partnership and plan her liability insurance, floor plan, tax schedule and cash flow? What can a mother do when her landlord says she can't set up a small child-care business in her home? How should a small, part-time nursery school program go about expanding into a full-time child care center?

These are just a few of the challenges facing an interdisciplinary team of 12 Cornell University students -- four human ecology undergraduates, four Law School students and four from the Johnson Graduate School of Management -- working as part of the new Cornell Small Children/Small Business (SC/SB) Project.

"With increasing numbers of parents in the workforce, families need more opportunities to find high-quality child care. Because of this, the success or failure of child-care businesses has both private and public consequences," says William Kell, the Thomas and Nancy Clark Professor of Law and director of the clinic. "The majority of child-care providers are working as small-business operators in all respects but have little business training or extra income to obtain legal and business advice."

To help these entrepreneurs, Cornell students take a course that prepares them, under faculty supervision, to provide direct technical assistance to local child-care entrepreneurs seeking advice on a wide variety of legal and business issues. In addition to working 10 to 12 hours a week on cases representing local providers, the students take a three- to five-credit law school course, The Small Business Clinic, taught by Kell with assistance from Pedro Perez, a visiting associate professor at the Johnson School, and Monchrieff Cochran, a professor at the College of Human Ecology.

While the SC/SB Project is a Cornell program, it works collaboratively with the Day Care and Child Development Council of Tompkins County to get referrals and generally to expand the council's support services for child care. For example, the students also are helping the day care council develop a health insurance pool for child-care providers, and the Johnson School students are developing a tool to help providers assess the financial health of their business and potential for obtaining financing.

"I'm taking the course because I liked the idea of an interdisciplinary approach and also the idea of working for actual Ithaca community members," says Lisa Ann Adler, a human ecology human development and social work major from Webster, N.Y. "I hope to gain more knowledge of how business and law play into child-care issues and the fulfillment of knowing that I'm actually helping a neglected group of laborers juggle the pressures they face."

Tim Houchin, a second-year law student, worked in the clinic all summer and now is doing research for the students and for clinic cases: "Working in the clinic gives me a lot of experience working with clients almost daily as well as working on issues that I didn't expect to be so varied, from writing up a partnership agreement between two women and helping a provider use small claims court to get payment for her services."

The clinic is supported by a grant from Cornell's J. Thomas and Nancy Clark Professorship in Entrepreneurship and Personal Enterprise. To contact the clinic about a potential case, contact the day care council at (607) 273-0259. For more information, contact William Kell at (607) 255-0454 or email to kell@law.mail.cornell.edu. The Cornell Law School web sites http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/.