New grant helps students with kids
Maria Quezada doesn’t know if she can afford to send her son to the same child care provider he’s gone to for the past year and a half.
As a senior majoring in mechanical engineering at USU, Quezada is like many students who are juggling school and parenthood. Help might be on the way, however, as she waits to hear if her application for a child care subsidy is accepted.
USU Vice Provost and family, consumer and human development professor Ann Austin received a grant totaling $579,000 to be spent over the next three years to help student parents like Quezada at USU.
“[The grant] has allowed parents to stay in school and to graduate,” Austin said.
Known as CCAMPIS (Child Care Access Means Parents in School), the grant is funded through the U.S. Department of Education. Austin was notified in October that she had been awarded the grant. Similar funding was received year and a half ago which Quezada and her husband, Jimmy, were recipients of.
Quezada said before they got the subsidy her son stayed with a Spanish-speaking family while she attended school. She said, “My biggest concern was my kid learning English.”
The grant helped pay for her to leave her child with a nationally accredited childcare provider, making it easier for her to attend USU where she will graduate from in May. Her son does homework and can now speak English well.
“Now I know my kid is learning,” she said of her 4-year-old.
The new grant will be dispersed over three years beginning in January and Leah Schilling, program administrator in the FCHD department, said the hope is to help parents through their education by re-awarding the same families with the grant each semester.
Since the funding for the previous grant ended in the fall of 2004, Quezada said it’s been very hard for her.
By helping the same families for consecutive semesters, children don’t have to change providers.
“We know that’s not good for children,” Schilling said.
About half of the funding is expected to pay for 50 to 70 percent of childcare costs for 25 to 30 children a semester, Schilling said. The rest of the grant money will be spent on researching how parent stress levels are affected as well as how children are affected.
“Parent stress is a huge factor in preparing children for school,” Schilling said.
The stress of having children and attending school can be very hard for parents as childcare can cost as much as a college education, Schilling said. The costs “can be a big roadblock” to parents receiving their degrees.
Recipients of the subsidy will attend parenting classes about child development that will help them learn what normal developmental indicators are and what warning signs to look out for. The program will also allow for study nights once a week where childcare will be provided so parents can focus on their schooling.
Evaluations conducted by graduate students trained by Austin will look at parent stress levels and marital satisfaction among parents as well as assess children’s math, language and social/emotional readiness throughout the program, Schilling said.
“The evaluations are fun for the kids,” she said. “They love to do them.”
To qualify for the CCAMPIS grant, parents can’t be eligible for state subsidies. In fact, parents must apply and be rejected for state funding in order to be accepted, Schilling said. The state subsidy requires one parent to work full time and the other to work a minimum of 15 hours. CCAMPIS is geared more toward university students, with requirements that only one parent must be a full-time student with the other going to school or working part-time.
The CCAMPIS grant requires that parents be PELL-grant eligible, full-time students.
“It helps to fill an important gap,” Austin said.
The grant also requires that children be placed with nationally accredited childcare providers which maintain a high standard of quality. Logan has three of these, including the on-campus Children’s House near the Spectrum. The grant will help to get more childcare providers in the area accredited as well.
As the grant-writer, Austin said she has a very significant interest in the subsidy since she was a student parent herself.
“I did go to school with three little children and I know how hard it was,” she said.
Ultimately, the grant will benefit between 75 and 120 families.
-mof@cc.usu.edu