The furniture had not yet arrived and the playground had still to be erected. But the parents who toured the campus's newest child development center last week liked what they saw and eagerly turned in applications.

The $3.3 million Hutchison Child Development Center, behind the Rec Pool and Lodge at Hutchison Drive and La Rue Road, is scheduled to open May 1 — offering care for 112 children from infancy to kindergarten age. A summer program will be offered for elementary school age children.

"This a milestone for UC Davis," said Barbara Ashby, manager of Human Resources' WorkLife unit, which includes child care and family services. The new center adds to the campus's child care capacity for the first time in 20 years, and it gives parents a choice of child care providers.

"Both are equally fine providers," Ashby said, referring to Campus Child Care Inc., a Davis company that operates the campus's Russell Park and La Rue Park centers, and Bright Horizons Family Solutions, an international company selected by the university to run the Hutchison center.

"UC Davis is all about diversity and options," Ashby said. "We are giving parents a choice of models and curricula."

She said the La Rue Park and Russell Park centers are based on the Montessori method, while Hutchison is based on emergent curriculum and project-based learning.

"Both are developmentally-appropriate practices that take into consideration the needs and experiences of each individual child." Ashby said.

For the Hutchison center's initial enrollment period, running from opening day until the end of the 2008 calendar year, the application period closed April 8. After that, Bright Horizons started to determine which children would be offered admission, with equal priority given to faculty, staff, students and campus volunteers. Bright Horizons and the university further prioritized the applications by date and time received.

Spaces not claimed by university affiliates will then be offered to the general public.

(Waiting lists will be maintained, with applications welcome at any time, for openings in 2009 and beyond.)

Today, Bright Horizons expected to start telling the first wave of applicants if their children would be offered enrollment by the end of the year. Families have 48 hours to accept, then another 48 hours to complete enrollment and put down deposits.

Faculty and staff parents pay the full cost of child care. At this time, only students are eligible for subsidies, funded by student registration fees, federal grant money and contributions from Student Housing.

Hutchison's 112 slots add to La Rue Park's 95 and Russell Park's 92 for a total of 299. (Child care also is available at the Early Childhood Laboratory, but it is first and foremost a teaching and research facility.)

Ashby said the Hutchison center has been eight years in the making, since then-UC President Richard Atkinson promoted a matching grant initiative for the expansion of child care facilities around the system.

Ashby said "there is clearly a return on investment," because quality child care helps in recruiting and retaining faculty and staff with families.

With space for almost 300 children now, UC Davis may still not meet the demand, Ashby said, particularly for infants and toddlers from birth to 3 years of age. These spaces are not only hard to come by on campus, but in the Davis community and all across the nation, Ashby said.

The reason is simple: Quality infant and toddler care is labor intensive and therefore costly to operate. The Russell Park, La Rue Park and Hutchison centers provide one caregiver for every four infants and toddlers.

In its planning for the Hutchison center, the university set aside space for 20 infants and toddlers. Only eight of those spaces are for the very youngest infants, those not yet crawling.

Yet, so big is the demand, that people like Steven Stoddard and Juliana Zamorano are signing up even before their children are born. Stoddard and Zamorano are expecting their first child, a daughter, on June 1.

Stoddard, a postdoctoral scholar in entomology, and Zamorano, a project cost controller for Schilling Robotics in Davis, said they will name their daughter Sofia, and they hope to start bringing her to the Hutchison center in October.

"We love it," said Zamorano, who was making her second visit to the center, this time with her husband. His lab is in Briggs Hall, just across La Rue Road from the new center. "We're hoping to meet here for lunch every day with Sofia," he said.

Liz Bowen, a researcher with the university's John Muir Institute of the Environment, said the new center "seems like a home … warm and comfortable."

Bowen signed up for a slot for her 2-year-old son, Erik Kimball. "He's in a wonderful family day care now," Bowen said. "But he's 2 and he's getting ready to explore some new things."

Bright Horizons comes to UC Davis with a worldwide reputation. The company runs 600 early care and education centers in the United States (including two in Sacramento), Canada and Europe, and is particularly popular at institutions of higher learning.

Most Bright Horizons facilities boast accreditation by the National Association for the Education of Young Children, described by Ashby as the gold standard in the field. The company will seek the same accreditation for the Hutchison center, but can do so only after it has been open for a year.

Campus Child Care Inc. already holds NAEYC accreditation for the Russell Park and La Rue Park centers.