Taking part in a mock client session for the Cornell Small Children/Small Business Project at the "Room for Growing" child care center on Coddington Road are, from left, client Francesca Crannell, students Erin Ardale (Law '00) and Russ Pechman (M.B.A. '00), Gloria Molina, the center's owner and operator, and undergraduate Michele Perez '00. Charles Harrington/University Photography
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 former homeless 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 hands-on challenges facing an interdisciplinary team of 12 Cornell students -- four human ecology undergraduates and four students each from the Law School and 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 work force, 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," said 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 small business 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 child-care 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 Graduate School of Management, and Mon 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 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," said Lisa Ann Adler, a human development and social work major from Webster, N.Y.
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 to 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, call the Day Care Council at 273-0259.
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