HPR

Crisis Over Childcare on NDSU Campus Ends on Optimistic Note

By Derek Dahlsad
Contributing Writer

North Dakota State University faculty and the Center for Child Development, an on-campus childcare facility, were surprised on March 9 to learn that the daycare would close in June 2011, leaving them without an option for child care in the fall. NDSU President Dean Bresciani, on the advice of faculty leaders, announced that the program was being discontinued as part of budget cuts to non-core academic programs. The Center was part of the early childhood education program that is no longer taught at the University, and as Bresciani explained on Friday, it “was an artifact of back when there was an academic program tied to the Center, and when that went away we kept funding it in the same way.” Unable to continue to fund the program, the decision was made to close the Center’s doors. Campus groups and faculty, however, strongly disagreed that the Center was not a core need of the University, and they quickly expressed support for keeping the center open and available to the staff that rely on it for childcare.

On Thurs. March 10, Bresciani postponed the Center’s closing to 2012, giving the University time to develop a plan to keep the Center for Child Development open.

Although assistant professor Sean Sather-Wagstaff, an Advocate in NDSU’s Advance Forward program, and his wife, also faculty at NDSU, have no children in the Center for Child Development, he recognized the importance of the Center to NDSU faculty. After the announcement of closure, Sather-Wagstaff created the “I support NDSU’s Center for Child Development” group on Facebook as source for discussion of the reactions to the announcement. NDSU’s Advance Forward program was created with a grant from the National Science Foundation to promote and support the needs of female faculty, spurred by the 2006 AAUP Faculty Gender Equity report which ranked NDSU poorly in regards to gender equality and the status of women in the education profession. 

“One of the centerpieces of the NSF review was the childcare facility for the faculty, because they said that was an indication that our university was prepared to make meaningful institutional transformation,” Sather-Wagstaff said. “For it to be the first thing to be cut went absolutely contrary to what the Forward program is working toward.”

The North Dakota Child Care Resource and Referral report for 2010 shows that there are approximately 18,891 children in Cass County in need of child care while the licensed day care programs can only support 10,043, or about 53% of children in need of care. The average size of an early childhood program in the area serves 27 children, so fulfilling the needs of the 38 children at the NDSU Center for Child Development would be a burden to both childcare providers and NDSU faculty. Like other child care centers, the current Center for Child Development does not even have room for all of the children of faculty in need of childcare. Dean Virginia Clark-Johnson of the College of Human Development and Education said that the current waiting list for on-campus childcare is double the number of children currently in the program.

Bresciani’s announcement of the Center’s extension into 2012 brought relief to the concerned faculty, and has made all sides optimistic that a plan can be found which can meet the University’s budget constraints and fulfill the childcare needs of NDSU faculty.  Dean Clark-Johnson is optimistic that the postponement will help the Center.

“This gives the University the opportunity to make this a campus-wide responsibility,” she said, indicating that she has every intention of continuing to maintain a quality program, and was confident that alternative funding could allow the program to expand to meet the needs of those faculty still on the waiting list. Moving towards a better climate for female faculty at NDSU, Sather-Wagstaff said, “it gives us a chance to engage in a dialogue about alternatives, that this is a vital program that should be expanded if we want to continue moving the institution forward in its transformation.”

In his willingness to work with faculty to find options, President Bresciani said he is looking towards models of operation that other university child care programs have used that would work for NDSU, and that he wants “a model that works right for NDSU and makes this a successful program.”  Bresciani added, “I could not have been more proud of the reaction the campus community expressed, and I couldn’t have been more pleased by the support we experienced from our legislators. It’s all very, very encouraging.”

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