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DAY CARE CAN MEAN A DEGREE
Source: Tacoma News Tribune
Author: Melissa Santos
Date: Nov 16, 2007
Theresa Skager spent her first two quarters at Tacoma Community College shuffling her daughter between friends’ and relatives’ houses on weekdays.
It wasn’t until the beginning of her third quarter that Skager, 36, was able to get Hannah, 3, into TCC’s on-campus child-care center.
The college is building a new day-care facility to help meet the demand for on-campus child care. Other schools, such as Clover Park Technical College and Pierce College, recently completed new child-care centers on their campuses.
Children can remain on the wait list for a spot at TCC’s center for a year, said center director Olga Webstad. At Washington State University and the University of Washington, the wait can be as long as a year and a half.
The issue is coming to a head because of the changing demographic of today’s college students, said state Sen. Paull Shin, D-Lynnwood, who chairs the Senate Higher Education Committee.
Colleges and universities are seeing more returning students, Shin said, which has fueled interest in campus child care.
“College students are now more than just 18-year-old kids,” Shin said. “A lot of them are married people with children who want to finish their education.”
Directors of campus child-care centers said their goal is to not have lack of services prevent students from getting their degrees.
“When we ask parents informally, ‘What have been your barriers to being in college?’ about 60 percent say they were impacted by the fact that we didn’t have child care,” said Michael Koetje, director of the two new centers in the Pierce College District. “That’s a big percentage that possibly wouldn’t be in school.”
Student parents benefit from the convenience of having their children cared for on campus as well as the centers’ willingness to work with student income levels, Koetje said. Most college centers charge on a sliding fee scale.
Skager said she pays the TCC Children’s Center only about a third of what she’d pay an outside day-care facility.
“They charge me for a quarter what it would be somewhere else for only a month,” said Skager, who’s studying to be a paralegal.
Scheduling is also an issue for student parents trying to arrange off-campus child-care services, Webstad said. Most centers offer either half-day or full-day care, but don’t allow parents to drop off their children for only the hours they have class, Webstad said.
Nursing student Katie Wilks said that before she enrolled her son J.J., 5, in the TCC Children’s Center this quarter, she used to have to schedule her classes around available day care.
She described trying to coordinate J.J.’s day care with her other two kids’ school schedules and her own.
“I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off,” said Wilks, 26. “I was coming to school in the morning while they were at school, then coming back at night for a night class.”
Now, she said, “J.J.’s at school when I’m at school.”
Many campus facilities double as laboratories where early-education students can earn practicum hours or conduct research, said Terri Kosik, president of the National Coalition for Campus Children’s Centers. That’s the case at Clover Park’s center and it also will be at TCC’s new center.
“These centers are needed not only for the care and education they provide children, but also the educational opportunities they provide students,” Kosik said.
Early-childhood education advocates don’t feel like the lack of campus child-care facilities is a new issue, Webstad said. The children’s centers coalition, an umbrella organization founded by 200 campus children’s centers around the country, has been around since 1982. But it’s in the past 10 years that the group’s membership has grown sharply – from 400 centers to 770.
Kosik attributed the issue’s increased visibility to more student parents and female college professors who need child care. The number of full-time female faculty members at U.S. colleges rose 36 percent between 1975 and 2000, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
In Washington state, legislators will re-examine a bill this session that would pour more money into a state program that matches funds colleges and universities raise for child-care services. The bill didn’t come up for a floor vote during the 2007 session, but college lobbyists said they think it will go further in 2008 because more institutions are saying students’ child care is a problem.
The existing grant program provides only $50,000 to community and technical colleges and $75,000 to universities in the state per year.
“It’s really only pennies,” said Dave Brown, president of the Graduate and Professional Student Senate at the University of Washington.
Capital funds for child-care projects are also hard to come by. Between 2003 and 2007, the Legislature contributed about $18 million to 10 campus child-care buildings at community and technical colleges, but that probably covered less than half of the total costs for the projects, which typically range between $2 million and $7 million each, said Tom Henderson, capital budget director for the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges.
The rest of the money for the centers came from student fees or private fundraising.
It wasn’t until the beginning of her third quarter that Skager, 36, was able to get Hannah, 3, into TCC’s on-campus child-care center.
The college is building a new day-care facility to help meet the demand for on-campus child care. Other schools, such as Clover Park Technical College and Pierce College, recently completed new child-care centers on their campuses.
Children can remain on the wait list for a spot at TCC’s center for a year, said center director Olga Webstad. At Washington State University and the University of Washington, the wait can be as long as a year and a half.
The issue is coming to a head because of the changing demographic of today’s college students, said state Sen. Paull Shin, D-Lynnwood, who chairs the Senate Higher Education Committee.
Colleges and universities are seeing more returning students, Shin said, which has fueled interest in campus child care.
“College students are now more than just 18-year-old kids,” Shin said. “A lot of them are married people with children who want to finish their education.”
Directors of campus child-care centers said their goal is to not have lack of services prevent students from getting their degrees.
“When we ask parents informally, ‘What have been your barriers to being in college?’ about 60 percent say they were impacted by the fact that we didn’t have child care,” said Michael Koetje, director of the two new centers in the Pierce College District. “That’s a big percentage that possibly wouldn’t be in school.”
Student parents benefit from the convenience of having their children cared for on campus as well as the centers’ willingness to work with student income levels, Koetje said. Most college centers charge on a sliding fee scale.
Skager said she pays the TCC Children’s Center only about a third of what she’d pay an outside day-care facility.
“They charge me for a quarter what it would be somewhere else for only a month,” said Skager, who’s studying to be a paralegal.
Scheduling is also an issue for student parents trying to arrange off-campus child-care services, Webstad said. Most centers offer either half-day or full-day care, but don’t allow parents to drop off their children for only the hours they have class, Webstad said.
Nursing student Katie Wilks said that before she enrolled her son J.J., 5, in the TCC Children’s Center this quarter, she used to have to schedule her classes around available day care.
She described trying to coordinate J.J.’s day care with her other two kids’ school schedules and her own.
“I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off,” said Wilks, 26. “I was coming to school in the morning while they were at school, then coming back at night for a night class.”
Now, she said, “J.J.’s at school when I’m at school.”
Many campus facilities double as laboratories where early-education students can earn practicum hours or conduct research, said Terri Kosik, president of the National Coalition for Campus Children’s Centers. That’s the case at Clover Park’s center and it also will be at TCC’s new center.
“These centers are needed not only for the care and education they provide children, but also the educational opportunities they provide students,” Kosik said.
Early-childhood education advocates don’t feel like the lack of campus child-care facilities is a new issue, Webstad said. The children’s centers coalition, an umbrella organization founded by 200 campus children’s centers around the country, has been around since 1982. But it’s in the past 10 years that the group’s membership has grown sharply – from 400 centers to 770.
Kosik attributed the issue’s increased visibility to more student parents and female college professors who need child care. The number of full-time female faculty members at U.S. colleges rose 36 percent between 1975 and 2000, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
In Washington state, legislators will re-examine a bill this session that would pour more money into a state program that matches funds colleges and universities raise for child-care services. The bill didn’t come up for a floor vote during the 2007 session, but college lobbyists said they think it will go further in 2008 because more institutions are saying students’ child care is a problem.
The existing grant program provides only $50,000 to community and technical colleges and $75,000 to universities in the state per year.
“It’s really only pennies,” said Dave Brown, president of the Graduate and Professional Student Senate at the University of Washington.
Capital funds for child-care projects are also hard to come by. Between 2003 and 2007, the Legislature contributed about $18 million to 10 campus child-care buildings at community and technical colleges, but that probably covered less than half of the total costs for the projects, which typically range between $2 million and $7 million each, said Tom Henderson, capital budget director for the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges.
The rest of the money for the centers came from student fees or private fundraising.