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Growing and Learning Together  
The Downtown Ithaca Children’s Center (DICC) provides innovative, affordable child-care for children ages 6 weeks to 5 years, plus after-school and summer-camp programs for school-age children throughout Tompkins County, on a full time or drop-in basis.  With a whole-child approach, warm staff, pioneering educational curriculum, supportive environment, and healthful, freshly prepared food, DICC provides a diverse community where children are happy, healthy, and prepared to enter their next educational setting.
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WelcomeWelcome to our new website which is now proudly exhibiting our new name “The Downtown Ithaca Children’s Center.”   We are hoping this new site will be able to provide you with an introduction to our completely revised and vastly improved program offerings.  
The former “Drop-In Children’s Center” has, over the last few years, undergone an intensive period of change and improvement that has positively affected virtually every aspect of the services we provide.  
Some of these changes include an overall increase in the number of hours and level of teacher training, a review and revision of all of our forms and procedures, the implementation of a Center-wide, education-focused and age appropriate lesson plan process, an increase in parent participation, and the introduction of a three component system assessing the needs and development of each of our children.  For more details about these program components please go to the program section. 
Staff members have now also been extensively trained to recognize a wide range of developmental milestones and behaviors, and to work closely with families and the professionals that provide therapeutic interventions when a child may be in need of additional supports.  
Another very exciting development is that we have received a grant from the Triad Foundation to establish a partnership with the Sciencenter to develop and implement a pioneering program to teach science to very young children.  We are completing the developmental stage of this program and are now holding classes both at the DICC and the Sciencenter for our children.  We are hoping to create a curriculum and method for teaching science that could also be used by other early childhood learning centers throughout the State.
In the course of all these changes we realized that the Drop-In Children’s Center has, in effect, become an entirely new entity, and that the time had come to change our name and rebrand ourselves.  Our name is left over from a much earlier time when the program was primarily designed to provide brief periods of care for child