| News Archive | The Press-Enterprise, September 20, 2006 Child care directors from South Korea tour Moreno Valley center for ideas By Melissa Eiselein/The Press-Enterprise MORENO VALLEY – A Moreno Valley child-development center was among those visited by eight South Korean child care center directors looking for ways to improve their facilities. The directors, all employed by Samsung Corp., took notes and snapped photos of rooms, children and teachers Tuesday as they toured the Jan Peterson Child Development Center in Moreno Valley. The Southern California visit also included stops at day-care centers at USC and UCLA. They plan to wind up the one-week tour with visits to centers in San Francisco and Las Vegas, where the MGM Grand Hotel has a day-care facility for employees' children, said Hyuk Jun Moon, an associate professor of child and family studies at the Catholic University of Korea and the tour's leader. About 30 percent of the 126 youngsters cared for by the Moreno Valley center are the children of employees of nearby Riverside County Regional Medical Center, said Carl Rowe, the center's executive director. Moon said he sought centers with ties to a corporation for the tour but chose the Moreno Valley center for its multigenerational concept. "This is in a community where the child care center is combined with elderly care," he said. Children at the center visit residents of the assisted-living homes next door twice a week. "We usually have enough children to go around so that each foster grandparent, as we call them, has at least one foster grandchild," Rowe said. "For the seniors, it's stimulating. For the children, they're able to see that there is a circle of life." |