Previous |
Next |
August 24, 2007, 01:00 PM ET
Coalition Calls on U. of Georgia to Expand Child Care
Professors, staff members, and students at the University of Georgia are petitioning the administration for expanded on-campus child care, saying the difficulty of finding high-quality care is a major source of anxiety for many of them, Robin Wilson reports on the Chronicle Web site.
Susan Mattern, an associate professor of history, told Wilson that the child-care crunch is particularly bad at the university, as there’s a dearth of high-quality day-care centers in the the Athens, Ga., area. Mattern is one of the leaders of the group, called the Campus Coalition for Expanding Childcare at UGA, that is lobbying for another day-care center. Wilson notes that …
The university has 33,000 students and 9,300 faculty and staff members. Its Child Development Lab at the McPhaul Center, which is primarily an educational tool for students in the university’s department of child and family development, provides day care for only 56 infants and toddlers. [...] It has a day-care waiting list of about 250 children, the university says. It can take years for children to move to the top of the list.
Mattern can attest to that. She “signed up her own children, who are now 6 and 4, for spots at the McPhaul Center soon after they were born. But they never got in. Instead, she and her former husband ended up putting the children in two different private centers and driving an hour and a half each way for dropoffs and pickups,” Wilson writes.
The administration is taking heed of her and others’ frustration with the current situation, Wilson writes. The provost and president have said they’ll meet with CCEC representatives early next month, before the group’s planned rally on September 27, she concludes.
Categories: General-interest, Faculty-hiring
Add Your Comment
Commenting is closed.