Tucked away inside Kerr Hall along The Fenway sits a space reserved for the smallest members of the university community: Northeastern’s daycare. The facility is decked out with children’s artwork plastered against the walls, colorful carpets trailing along the floors, personalized cubbies that reflect each child’s unique personality and masses of toys like building blocks and creative puzzles.
The Russell J. Call Children’s Center, located on the second floor of Kerr Hall, is a staff benefit available to all Northeastern faculty and staff. The highly sought-after program consistently has a waitlist, said Lee Ann Burdick, the center’s director.
Originally situated in White Hall, the discovery of significant water damage forced the center to relocate to Kerr Hall in fall 2023.
“When I toured it, I was really blown away,” said Jillian Landry, a disability specialist at Northeastern whose 4-year-old son Jack is enrolled at the center. “It way surpassed my expectations and I was just really excited to have Jack join the Northeastern community. I thought everything from the curriculum to what they’ve done with the space just looked really wonderful and warm and inviting for kids.”
Burdick said the heart of the daycare is a result of its “play-based learning” technique, with a team of teachers that includes work-study and co-op students. The children in the program learn through playing, which stimulates their minds while also providing entertainment.
“Since 1975, Northeastern’s Russell J. Call Children’s Center on the Boston campus has been a cherished partner to university employees,” Northeastern media relations wrote in an email to The Huntington News. “It continues to provide a safe learning and play environment for their young children in its current home in Kerr Hall.”
The center has two classrooms; one which caters to 16 children and the other to 18, each with a mix of ages and genders, with kids as young as 2 years and 9 months and as old as 5. The classrooms include toys such as blocks, to encourage them to think like an engineer, plastic body parts to teach the kids about their anatomy and more.
Habyby Vassallo, a second-year graduate student in the global studies and international relations program, was on co-op at the daycare in fall 2024. She said that the daycare benefits not only the children, but also students like herself.
“I feel like working with kids can really make a change, a really long-term impact,” Vassallo said. “Working here can make and give me the ability to understand more about how they can develop or how they can learn soft skills that you really don’t see when you study. You need to be on the field to learn more about them.”
With the mixture of kids comes a variety of interests and knowledge levels, meaning the teachers have to use varying methods of play so each child can learn in the most effective way. Burdick said the daycare’s team accommodates learning techniques for all the children they care for.
“There’s a lot of conversation around ‘Let’s do the same thing every year,’” Burdick said. “And we might do the same themes every year, but it’s going to look different every year because every class is different, and what they need is different.”
Adjacent to Kerr, Northeastern is set to commence construction of a permanent playground for the children that will replace its current outdoor playspace, Burdick said. She added that the plans seem to indicate that Kerr Hall will be the final location for the daycare, following its time in White Hall and the Forsyth Building in previous years. Northeastern media relations did not specify whether Kerr Hall will be the permanent location of the daycare in its response to The News’ questions.
Several residents of Kerr Hall, a residence hall for first-years, say they were not informed of the presence of the center in their building before move-in, where the second-floor study room was replaced by the daycare.
“I see [the kids] downstairs [in the lobby],” said Nick Magnarelli, a first-year chemistry major who lives in Kerr. “They’re not really in the way. My room’s on the side where that playground is. So the most interaction I have is I hear them screaming, which I don’t get annoyed by.”
Like students at the university, the children are able to get hands-on play experience and gain an understanding of real-world lessons.
“They are really creative in their methods of teaching the kids — all based in play and we really love that,” Landry said. “We’ve seen [that Jack] is so happy to be there. He’s always excited to go to school and play with his friends.”
