Child care grant renewed with more funding
USU received funding to renew a program that provides child care for parents in school.
Lisa Boyce, executive director of the Dolores Dore Eccles Center for Early Childhood Education, together with Konie Humphreys, Aggie CARE coordinator, worked to revive the Child Care Access Means Parents in School, a grant which makes graduating from college easier for students with children.
Kaylee Roholt, a masters student studying professional school counseling, said the grant will save her and her husband at least $300 a month.
Roholt’s husband is an undergraduate student studying fisheries and aquatic sciences, and with their schedules, child care is absolutely necessary, she said.
“We’re really excited because this will help our family out a lot,” Roholt said. “School is already so expensive and even in everyday life, there are hidden expenses to everything. I anticipate this grant to be a great help.”
CCAMPIS is specifically for student-parents. The goal of the grant is to help students stay in school and graduate without the financial burden of childcare, Humphreys said.
If students have assistance in this area, they will continue their education and graduate with one less thing to worry about. It is a four-year grant that will help 100-125 families, she said.
Besides providing child care subsidy, which is measured on the sliding scale used in childcare, the grant also implements on-campus child care three nights a week, serving as a study time for parents, Boyce said.
To qualify for the CCAMPIS Grant, applicants need to be eligible for Pell Grants, full-time students and have a denial letter from the Division of Workforce Services. If a student can get funding from DWS, they should go with that instead of CCAMPIS, Humphreys said.
“The goal of the grant is to get more students graduated, to provide their children with high quality childcare and to allow those students time to study throughout the week so that they’re able to spend as much time as possible with their children when they are at home,” Humphreys said.
If students have the grant, they can also go to accredited off-campus child care providers.
There are ten nationally-accredited providers in the state of Utah, and nine of those work with Aggie Care. Accreditation is a lengthy process with standards that providers need to meet, Humphreys said.
Most childcare providers in the Logan area are licensed, which gives them certain stipulations and qualifications, but when a child care center is accredited, it becomes higher quality, which is a benchmark Humphreys and Boyce feel is important.
Boyce discussed steps in the national standard of receiving child care accreditation.
“Accreditors will send observers to the college to see if they will receive accreditation which they will then hold for three years until the next observation,” Boyce said. “These standards are rigorous, and every program has to meet a particular criteria. Almost every child care center in the Logan area is accredited because of the CCAMPIS Grant.”
Boyce works closely with the Eccles Center, which is the child care center on campus. Program managers of the DDE keep 25 percent of the slots open for students with children, she
said.
The DDE has been important in implementing the grant, Boyce said. With the grant, students will be able to have easy access to the center, which covers students’ child care subsidies while providing support for accreditation, she said.
The grant was approved at the beginning of September, and administrators had planned to have student-parents enrolled in the program this semester, but with the government shutdown, enrollment has been postponed.
Sophia Sellers is a single mom in her second year of the health sciences program.
“It is an enormous stress relief to know that I won’t have to take out additional loans to cover child care with the grant,” Sellers said.
“We are excited to have this grant back and to be able to provide that support to parents coming from all sorts of different economic backgrounds,” Boyce said.
–courtney.kearns@aggiemail.usu.edu
Twitter: @courtykearns