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Editorial: Band-Aid needed now for student childcare
With kids waiting at home, it's hard to go out of your way to attend this odd meeting or that. You have to shuffle around the baby-sitters and strategically align this time with that just to slip away. But student parents felt strongly enough last fall to go out at night - when your kids are pressing for help on the homework and there's your own and the dishes to do - to an Associated Students meeting to plead for more university childcare subsidies. Really it should have been a petition to redress grievances. For the University of Arizona not only holds the peculiar distinction of being the sole Pac-10 school without an on-site childcare facility, we also subsidize childcare for a less than one percent of students with children on this campus. There are between 2,500 to 3,500 student parents on this campus. The university this fiscal year has allotted $7,500 for student parent subsidies - enough for only about nine students, according to Mimi Gray, the UA's childcare coordinator. The UA offers these subsidies to student parents so they can seek out childcare on their own and pay for it. Now the $7,500 has dried out and there are still 95 student parents on the waiting list for subsidies wondering what to do. Gray says the childcare program needs between $100,00 and $150,000 to realistically meet the demand for aid. She has been saying that since this fall, before the funds dried out and left the meager resource center for childcare student parents have on this campus now floundering for funds. The gap alone between the needed $100,000 and the allotted $7,500 alone is embarrassing. Now consider that faculty, who on average have far greater salaries, get the $150,000 they need and the number of faculty with children and student parents with children are split roughly even. Is it any wonder the funds allotted to students evaporated so rapidly? Is it not a wonder that there is not a greater hue and cry for more of these sorely-needed funds? President Peter Likins has expressed his support for an on-campus childcare facility, which describes as a permanent solution rather than a subsidy Band-Aid. And certainly this is true. But the on-site childcare facility is still a $4 million pipe dream somewhere years into the future. Meanwhile, the blood keeps flowing among the ranks of the students waiting with dim prospects that aid will come soon without an infusion of cash into the university program. Last night ASUA met again to consider drafting a resolution requesting these sorely-needed funds. The resolution was tabled as the senators moved to wait until their next meeting before voting, hoping more student parents will come to their next meeting to plead their cases. And so the funds for childcare subsidies remain dried up and the movement we see is the dry brushing of hopes left still unanswered. Meanwhile there is a list full of fellow students with a full load of classes and dreams and a delicate balancing of both waiting for the most basic of helps universities afford their student parents. And every night taken out to hire a baby-sitter so they can plead for help that should come costs money - and courageous students - we can ill-afford.
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