Cutting-Edge Kids : Education: El Camino College’s brand-new child development center gives preschoolers--and adults--a million-dollar experience.

From its co-ed bathrooms to its multicultural reading library, El Camino College’s new child development center sits squarely on the cutting edge.

Dolls--male and female--are black, brown, Anglo and Asian. Playrooms feature “conversation pits,” and out on the playground there will be live animals, be they bunnies, baby chicks or an occasional billy goat.

“It’s going to be an absolutely top-notch center,” said Ann Hussmann,a professor of early childhood education at El Camino and one of those who helped design the center and its curriculum.

Opened Thursday with an official ribbon-cutting ceremony, the $1-million, state-funded center is not exclusively for children. It also serves as a laboratory for El Camino students studying early childhood development. Students will work in the playrooms and also observe children at play from behind the glass observation walls.

El Camino is one of the last campuses in the South Bay to get a child development center, although the college has served the area since 1947.

“When I was a student here 30 years ago,” Hussmann said Thursday, “they were talking about (building a center). So today is a big day for me.”

With the ribbon-cutting complete, the new center is open to the public, although its director, Paul Fisher, said only 24 vacancies remain. It can accommodate 72 children at a time, and 96 over the course of a full day because some children are enrolled only half a day. El Camino plans eventually to add on to the center, doubling its size and enrollment.

The center’s design details and even its toys are a mirror of modernity. The play kitchens, for instance, come equipped with mock microwave ovens.

Even the family values are modern. Although the bookracks are well supplied with such children’s classics as “Goodnight Moon” and “Where the Wild Things Are,” the reading material reflects the reality of children’s lives today. Among the other titles are “At Daddy’s on Saturday,” the story of a child with divorced parents.

The center offers a variety of programs, including half-day preschool for children whose parents cannot afford to pay any tuition and all-day child care at a cost of $125 a week for working parents. Children as young as 2 years old can be enrolled if they are potty-trained.

The 7,600-square-foot, adobe-colored building contains three large play areas and a fully outfitted kitchen, complete with a restaurant-sized stove. Dozens of tiny bright blue, plastic chairs surround the work tables in the playrooms. There are small sinks for messy would-be artists, bins of building blocks, play trucks, crayons and scissors.

Even the design details are child-centered. The clay floor tiles in the entry feature tiny handprints, pressed into wet clay by the first 38 children who enrolled in the program when it opened in temporary quarters on campus last fall.

Regardless of the income level of a child’s family, Hussmann said, the center will strive to develop an individualized development program.

“If (children) feel good about themselves, if they’re successful,” Hussmann explained, “they’ll be happy learners.”