 |
Photo by Reed Hutchinson UCLA Photographic Services |
Gay Macdonald, executive director of UCLA's child-care program, watches children at the Krieger Center make art. |
Student families to get aid for child care
By Cynthia Lee
Today Staff Writer
UCLA’s long history of serving large numbers of low-income students helped the university’s child-care program win a $1.1-million federal grant that will assist more student families in accessing quality child care.
The U.S. Department of Education grant, which will provide UCLA Early Care and Education with $283,803 annually over the next four years, will help subsidize child-care tuition for an additional 15 to 20 low-income families next year at the program’s University Village Center.
Awards were given to 116 of the 434 colleges and universities that applied. UCLA’s application scored 106 out of 110 possible points.
Help is coming at a time when finding child care in West Los Angeles is becoming more challenging. The real estate boom has reduced the number of home-based child-care providers in the area. Some have sold their homes to capitalize on rising real estate values and moved away; others have relocated because of escalating rents.
“We know there are more than 300 UCLA students with dependent children,” said Gay Mac-
donald, executive director of UCLA Early Care and Education. Currently, the program subsidizes child-care tuition for 50 very low-income student families through a California State Department of Education grant. Another 12 to 15 families have scholarships through an endowment that is the result of 30 years of fund-raising by the program. But that’s still not enough, Macdonald said.
Only about half the spaces prioritized for student families are accessible to them, due to the lack of funding for subsidies. The new grant, called a Child Care Access Means Parents in School grant, will raise the number of student families funded from about 65 to about 85, she explained.
“Students who qualify for the Pell grant will qualify for full childcare support,” Macdonald said. UCLA has one of the highest percentages of Pell grant recipients in the nation.
The new grant will also cover the cost of hiring a family services coordinator, who will advise student families on community resources if they’re experiencing problems, from marital difficulties to financial predicaments.
“Our job is to take care of their children, but families have other needs. For some, it’s ‘Where do I get a bus schedule?’ For others, it’s ‘Which public school do I send my older children to?'”
For single parents, getting their child into one of Macdonald’s three centers has been the key factor in allowing them to continue their education. Michiko Kaneyasu considers herself lucky to have gotten her 3-year-old daughter, Mayu, into the Krieger Center on scholarship in 2002 after being on the wait list for two years. “Some people never get in,” Mayu’s mother said.
After graduating in linguistics, Kaneyasu chose UCLA for graduate studies in the Asian Languages and Cultures Department, largely because of the child-care program.
“I couldn’t have continued on to graduate school if my daughter wasn’t at the child-care center,” she said. “My daughter loves going there. And I have time to study. I have nothing to worry about.”
The grant will mean “that more people like myself will be helped,” she said. “And that’s wonderful.”
Enrollment of student families who are eligible for assistance is scheduled to begin in Winter Quarter 2006.
|
