For the last 15 years, the department of human development’s Child Development Program (CDP) and the Washington State University Children’s Center (CC) have shared a building, and will now also share a collaborative program.

The CDP has been operating for almost 85 years as a half-day childcare program for children 3 to 5 years old.

CDP’s main focus is to train teachers in a school setting and to provide outreach to families and educational research, said Brenda Boyd, associate professor in the department of human development.

The CC program has been operating on campus for about 40 years. It has provided childcare for about 170 children of WSU faculty, staff and students.

The CC program provides both full-time and part-time childcare, said Rose Jackson, director of the WSU Children’s Center.

The merge was first initiated by upper administration that sought to combine the two very similar programs.

“It just seemed like a logical connection to bring those two things together and to particularly allow the Children’s Center to be more engaged in the academic commission of the University,” Boyd said.

CDP and CC will combine their financial systems to cover the research and educational aspects of the program, which will cause a change in childcare fees.

“Our financials systems operated very differently, so getting those to kind of align and figuring out how they can work was a bit of a challenge for us, but I think we’ve got most of the bigger kinks worked out,” Jackson said.

Some new changes will take effect in response to the merge on July 1, 2015.

“One of the things that is going to happen is that the people who have staffed our Child Development Program … will have some roles here at the Children’s Center,” Boyd said.

Some of the staff members, such as Boyd herself, will take on an administrative role, while student teachers and permanent teachers will be distributed throughout each room.

“Students will get to be in lots of different classrooms and we’re really excited about that opportunity,” Boyd said.

By combining the two programs into one, the number of staff and children will increase.

”It’s more of a growth for both organizations as opposed to these two entities just coming together,” said Aaron Alonzo, fiscal technician for WSU Children’s Center. “We’re both getting some advantages out of this.”

Some parents have asked questions in regards to the longer class hours and how it will affect their children.

“In the CDP currently, the children are doing a lot in those two and a half hours, and so what they will see is that their children are getting the same learning opportunities but it’s stretched out,” Jackson said.

Although the hours will increase for CDP families, the curriculum will remain the same.

CDP parents will have to pay a higher tuition fee to support the business model of the combined program.

“The parents are being invited to participate and enroll their kids for half-time, but that tuition will be more expensive for them than it was with the CDP,” Boyd said.

CC has hosted two question-and-answer sessions for parents to learn more about the combined programs. For additional questions, Rose Jackson can be contacted through the Children’s Center.