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Affordable and flexible campus child-care and family-inclusive policies and practices must become an integral part of this state's commitment to public higher education as UMass Amherst prepares for the year 2000."
Family Issues Committee Report on the Needs of Student and Staff Families, February 1996
Here is what Sharan Dalton's day looks like: Alarm clock rattles her out of dreams at 5:30. She catches the news while she lets the coffee work its magic, packs son's lunch and her own bookbag. Wakes up Kyler at seven, gets him dressed and fed so they can dash out the door by eight. Drops him off with a kiss at 8:15 at UMass child-care, parks in D-lot on the edge of campus, catches the bus up the hill to her first class at 8:30. At the other end of the schoolday, races to pick up Kyler before day-care closes at 5:15, grocery-shops and runs errands, makes something easy like pasta or pork chops, gives Kyler his bath, a little TV, bedtime story. Studies until sleep either in her bed or, more likely, on the pillow of her books brings her day to an end.
"My biggest conflict is being totally exhausted and still having a long list of things to be done," says the twenty-six-year-old journalism major and single mother, hoisting her Nike-clad feet onto the coffee table in a North Village apartment where the design theme is Kyler at every stage of his four years of existence. The pager clipped to the waist of Sharan's cycling shorts ensures that she is just a beep away from dropping everything, from any point in her daily round, should Kyler need her.
Busyness and exhaustion are the common canticle of any parent. Increasingly, it is a song that students are singing, as more of them, like Sharan Dalton, arrive at UMass with youngsters in tow, in need of child-care and the financial aid to pay for it.
What's available falls seriously short of desperate need, according to critics of current services. The University Child Care Center, with two buildings on the west edge of campus, Grassroots and New World, serve toddlers and preschoolers only. Seventy-eight highly coveted spaces are all that exist for the 1,229 students, and the hundreds of UMass staff, who have small children. There is no infant care anywhere on campus. There is no after-school care for older children, whose winter and spring vacations do not coincide with the UMass schedule. There is no coverage for student/parents whose advisors can see them only very early in the morning, whose study teams get together late at night, or who have evening classes and weekend exams. One frustrated single mother of a seven-year-old described it as "the ongoing nightmare of finding classes to fit my schedule as a parent." Finding sympathetic professors who will grant an extension because a week was lost to chicken pox was often just as hard, she said.
Flexible, affordable child-care was one of the list of demands made by students during the takeover of the Goodell building this spring. At the heart of the outcry was the feeling that UMass, as an institution, has yet to acknowledge serious shifts in the demographic sands; that it still thinks of the average student as fresh from high school, unfettered by dependents. Child care, originally set up on campus in 1943 for women whose husbands were away at war, is inadequate for the new population of single parents with no family, no proverbial "village" of aunts and grandmas, nearby. It has yet to function well for undergraduates who, like Dalton, saw the value of a college education only after becoming a parent "put my feet on the ground." There is little acknowledgment, the protesters claimed, that in an economy which demands more and more education for the most basic jobs people will be pursuing degrees well into their childbearing years. At the same time, many of those women and despite thirty years of the women's movement, it is still women who assume most of the responsibility for children are on their own, poor, and dependent on a newfangled "transitional assistance" system that has cut their college subsidies from five years to two.
The Goodell takeovers hastened, but did not initiate, a review of child-care at UMass. A Campus Child Care Task Force was set up last December, notes director of university child care Maryanne Gallagher, and had begun reviewing the ways the current system falls short of need. A panoply of organizations, from employee unions to graduate students to Everywoman's Center, are represented on the twenty-member team. Incredibly, almost every biweekly meeting was fully attended, impressing Gallagher with the fact that even members without children of their own understand that "it is family services that are needed," not simply more child-care.
"We all want to do something right now," says Gallagher, a Joni-Mitchell-lookalike who reports she has up to 100 children on her waiting list at any time, including infants whose parents are already vying for slots the children can't fill until they're fifteen months old. "But developing a plan is going to take time. Do we have to wait for a comprehensive plan before we begin implementing smaller pieces?"
Ever so slowly, those pieces are beginning to emerge. Child-care at the center has been available only on an all-or-nothing basis: eight hours a day, five days a week, with little option of a break in the summer. (Sharan Dalton, for instance, wanted to take Kyler out during her own break from classes, but kept him there all summer to preserve his slot.) Starting in July, part-time-care still full days, but fewer days a week became available.
Some, wanting much more flexibility, are pushing for "occasional care" on an as-needed basis; night care; and coverage during special events like lectures and concerts. More than any other item on the child-care agenda, occasional care is the hot-button. While some favor the drop-in centers found at some community colleges, which traditionally serve more working women, others are anxious about how longer hours or irregular attendance would affect children. Neil Brigham, assistant director of child care, says that for him "the important thing is kids' needs. Are we talking about a kid being here from eight in the morning till eleven at night? I personally have some concerns about that. But there are people who believe that option should be available."
At UMass as elsewhere, child care does not come cheap. But it is calculated on family size and income, and some programs exist to help with the expense. Nineteen slots at the child care center are reserved for families on public assistance. Vouchers for needy parents are provided by both the UMass Graduate Student Senate and Undergraduate Student Government Association. There are sibling discounts and tuition assistance from the town of Amherst. Even as strident a voice for change as twenty-eight-year-old Jon Zibbell, a single father from Boston, has benefited from such programs, which supplemented his daughter's day-care for years and now that she's in first grade her after-school care.
We found Zibbell, a forthright and likable anthropology major, in a tank-top and baseball cap at his counter job at Amber Waves, a natural foods hangout in downtown Amherst. When he got custody of Kayla three years ago, he says, he was already working fifty hours a week at the restaurant and a bookstore and pulling a fifteen-credit courseload in night classes. Unable to maintain that schedule as a solo dad, he turned two years ago to AFDC to help with food stamps, health insurance and rent. As an organizer in the call for more child-care this spring, he holds that if UMass is to live up to its promise to be more diverse, some of that diversity should include young, poor single parents.
"It's basically the issue of public access," said Zibbell. "It's not just recruiting students, but retaining them."
Being at once a diligent student and dutiful parent is exhausting to contemplate, nerve-wracking in practice. But Becky Forest balks at the suggestion that the two jobs are incompatible, and fingers ingrained sexism as the reason why it's so hard. When, in her first year of graduate work in economics, she became pregnant with her son Uriah, she felt singled out for comments from which male students whose partners were expecting babies seemed exempt. "Historically, grad school has been a pretty elite enterprise, with men having wives at home," says Forest, who is thirty-two. "I neither come from money nor do I have a housewife. But I still feel I have a right to be here and get this degree."
Even so, the process of getting her degree has been extended beyond expectations by the processes of bearing, breast-feeding, and finding care for Uriah and Summer, now two. Finding child-care, says Forest, was one of the most frustrating experiences of her life. Since UMass has not offered infant care for years, she had to search for a baby-sitter off campus, calling virtually every one of the hundred or so names on a list provided by the town. The few care-givers set up to look after infants were at capacity. The one with an opening charged $250 a week, more than Forest or her unemployed partner made in a week. "If I had needed to pick a vet, I would have had more choice," she says.
Forest finally found a reliable and affordable sitter, and now gets a small monthly subsidy through the GSS to put her children in preschool three mornings a week. The rest of the time, her partner stays home with them; if he were to get a job, she said, his income would only go to pay their day-care bill. Forest, who herself works three jobs editing two journals and doing research for a geography professor will start her sixth year of graduate school this fall.
It is just before eleven, circle time in Heather Mach's group of preschoolers at New World Child Care. Today's activity is a guessing game in which Mach hides a child under a cartoon-covered sheet. Despite the heat, the children take turns diving gleefully under the sheet while their classmates guess who's hiding.This center, New World, and its twin, Grassroots, stand side by side just through a spongy stand of forest from the football stadium. The capacious, broad-roofed buildings were constructed as 4-H lodges in the '30s. The fieldstone fireplaces, now boarded over, and dark pine paneling recall an era when good-quality, natural materials abounded. As the remaining two child-care sites there once were five scattered around campus they have, says Neil Brigham, done good service as homes-away-from-home for thousands of children from UMass's international community. (The global reach is evident from a construction-paper train bearing names such as Tarina, Paola, Cilka, Alejandro, and Oluwaseun.)
But the usefulness of the old lodges is waning, says Brigham. For one thing, they're damp; the toddler area in the basement floods most springs, and in wet years the mosquitoes give no quarter. Talk has turned to a new facility. The ideal center would serve 200 children and multiple additional purposes: research, teacher training, and counseling space and other family services.
Yet finding a new site, not to mention the money, will be a colossal undertaking. Some want child-care in the center of campus, easy for parents to reach; others argue there is no room and no parking there.
So far, there has been no formal proposal that a new facility be built, and the task force will keep on hammering out a proposal for both short- and long-term recommendations for child-care. Regardless of what that process looks like in the next years, the child-care discussion will not go away if anything, it will intensify as social mores, parenting practices, economics and student demographics continue to change. If it's any comfort, said Neil Brigham, UMass is not going through these changes in solitude. "I suspect," he said, "that this will become even a bigger issue in coming years for colleges all over the country."
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