The first course in child care was introduced at UT in 1922, and a nursery school was first operated in the summer of 1927, for three- to five-year-olds. With the arrival of Dr. Ella J. Day in 1929, the Nursery School was immediately changed to year-round operation.
As part of the plans for a new wing to the Home Economics Building in 1937, UT constructed, at a cost of $35,000, one of the first separate buildings in the nation designed as a nursery school, and the first on a university campus. Dr. Day, a home economics faculty member, designed the building. No plans or models existed for such a building, and UT’s Nursery School was immediately famous. It had an “observation room” from which students (and parents) could watch children unobserved. Since the building predated one-way glass, the wall between the observation room and the multipurpose room was a screen—painted white and well-lighted on the multipurpose room side; painted black and unlighted on the observation room side. Hundreds of requests for the plans were received, and hundreds of people toured the facility.
Originally, tuition was $30 for three months of five-day-a-week participation from 8:30 until noon, and $35 if the child stayed from 8:30 a.m. until 3:00 p.m. The facility was renovated in 1982 to accommodate programmatic changes, and renamed Child Development Laboratory and, in 2005, the University of Tennessee Early Learning Center for Research and Practice.
See also Child Care Center for Children of Employees; Early Learning Center for Research and Practice; Jessie Harris Building.