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Affordable day care opportunities are at the very top of the Student Government Association’s list of priorities, and they will spend much of this school year actively promoting student awareness of their forthcoming initiatives. Through exhaustive lobbying, the SGA hopes to raise the level of discussion surrounding child care to a powerful crescendo as they make their case to the administration.
During the initial hoopla and excitement, students, faculty and staff all need to bear one important fact in mind: advocacy for child care on campus will be a slow, arduous process. University officials estimate that the feasibility study alone could take a full semester, and only then will the metaphorical ball begin to roll. Even if such a program is approved, the university must still apply for grants, hire a staff and decide where the facility should be located.
Where to house a child care facility is a complicated question, and one that most students aren’t asking. On a campus with 25,000 daily inhabitants, security will be a major concern. Additionally, any space used to attend to children must meet a rigorous list of qualifications. Simply labeling an empty room in the Ekstrom library basement a “child care facility” is obviously insufficient.
As the university does not currently have a facility that would fit the bill, it must either renovate an existing structure or build a new one from the ground up. Either way, it will be costly.
Staffing a child care facility is also not a simple matter. In this regard, U of L has two options. It can either form a partnership with an outside contractor, like that between the University of Kentucky and Kindercare, or build a child care program into the Education department, similar to the lab school created at Eastern Kentucky University. Both will take time.
Advocacy for child care must be a long-term commitment by supporters, and a realistic assessment of the time and resources necessary to create such a program is essential to its success. More than likely, some freshman Political Science major, elected as the 2008-2009 SGA president, will still find a child care initiative in the “in box.”
If the creation of affordable child care is important to you, remember that one year of newspaper articles and campus debates is only the first step. Future U of L students and their children will reap the benefits of our efforts today, and will hopefully have many opportunities that even we ourselves were not fortunate enough to have.
