Meriel Salisbury, a kindergartner at Hilltop Child Development Center, concentrates on the monkey bars as her classmates wait their turn during recess Thursday. The school will be offering all-day kindergarten next fall and will also be adding several classrooms to the building.

Between 12:15 p.m. and 2:30 p.m., Hilltop Child Development Center at Kansas University is quiet. Even with new construction on both ends of the building, for those two hours and 15 minutes, everything stops.

It’s nap time.

The construction consists of five new classrooms to meet a high demand for child care. And come this fall, the center is bringing back its full-day kindergarten program.

“I think we’ll be better able to meet the needs of our families here on campus,” said executive director Pat Pisani. “We think this will be very convenient for them.”

The child care center has 212 students. After the construction is completed on both east and south wings, Hilltop will be licensed to serve about 300 students. And this means a little relief on the growing waiting list.

“The waiting list is now even larger than it was when the university built this facility,” Pisani said. Hilltop has been housed at 1604 Irving Hill Road since 2000. During the year, the number of children waiting to get a spot can get up to 350.

“There’s just an obvious need on campus that there needed to be more spaces available,” Pisani said. “That prompted the university to decide that it was time to do the expansion.”

Hilltop caters to KU-affiliated families. Students get top priority, followed by university employees. “It’s probably about 55 percent student families and most of the remainder being KU staff and faculty,” Pisani said.

Kyle Camarda, assistant professor in the chemical and petroleum engineering department, and his wife, Karen Camarda, who works at Washburn University, will continue to take advantage of the convenience of using Hilltop for their youngest daughter, Logan, 5. Typically she would spend the second half of the day there for day care after going to Sunset Hill School for kindergarten the first part of the day. In August, she will begin full-time kindergarten at Hilltop.

“If there are any problems, if our child gets sick he can just walk over and he’s there in five minutes,” Karen Camarda said of her husband.

She said another convenience of using the campus facility is that between semesters or other school breaks families can opt not to take their child and save money.

The construction on the L-shaped building started in January.

The east wing will be finished first, in time for fall classes. The three extra classrooms are for 1- and 2-year olds. The south wing, which houses preschoolers and kindergartners, will get another two rooms that will open in August 2009.

With the building expansion, the staff will also be growing. Pisani said the center will be looking for 15 to 19 full-time staffers and another 20 part-time employees. They are also converting the after-school kindergarten room into a staff room and remodeling other spaces into new administrative offices.

“It’s going to be a challenge as it is to manage a building with close to 300 children in it,” Pisani said. “The difficulty of that is maintaining the quality that we’ve always been so proud of. And we’re going to do it.”

Hilltop opened in 1972. KU students are paying for the construction at about $10 a year each.