In Depth: Many Resources Available to Women on Campus

The Student Life section of Utah State Today highlights work written by the talented student journalists at Utah State University. Each week, the editor selects a story that has been published in The Utah Statesman or the Hard News Café, or both, for inclusion in Utah State Today.

 

By Debra Hawkins in The USU Statesman, Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2008

 

Many women will choose to drop out of school before they ever reach graduation for a variety of reasons, including a lack of support or becoming a wife and mother.

 

The Women’s Center and programs such as the CCAMPIS program are trying to change that by supporting women, creating the resources they need on campus such as lactation rooms and providing mothers with child care so they can attend classes.

 

 

In the last two years, the Women’s Center has tried to let all women know the center is available to them, said Patricia Stevens, director of the Women’s Center.

 

According to their mission statement, the Women’s Center strives to provide assistance and referrals to women about their opportunities on campus, she said. Stevens said the center is trying to change the image of the center from being the Reentry Women’s Center to just the Women’s Center, serving all women on campus.

 

“What we have been trying to do is to let people know that we have a women’s center that serves every woman on this campus, no matter what they need,” Stevens said. “We are for you too, come see us.”

 

The center tries to bring together a group of opportunities for women to talk about the issues that are affecting them, Stevens said. The center helps women figure out where they need to go for certain problems, handling anything that is interfering with a women’s academic success, including anything from school and job issues to emotional issues, she said.

 

“We are here to help a woman broaden her horizons,” Stevens said. “We provide educational as well as entertaining women’s events about issues. We are also here to advocate for her, if she doesn’t know where to go for something, we are here. We try to empower, advocate and educate.”

 

 

USU’s campus has gone from one lactation room to having six available to women to nurse, pump milk or change their babies when the occasion arises.

 

With Utah having the highest birthrate in the nation, almost one-third higher than any other state, Stevens said there are a lot of women on campus who have children and their physical needs were not being met.

 

The typical protocol in the Utah culture is for the man to serve a mission and then come home and get married soon, Stevens said. With the Latter-day Saints church advocating to every young man and woman to get an education, there are a lot of young married couples on campus who eventually have children, she said.

 

“It is not going to be long before (married students) have children and those children are going to be babies who want milk,” Stevens said. “We felt that there was a population of students that we weren’t addressing that. If we could provide certain facilities, we could retain those young mothers for a longer period of time.”

 

Stevens said working at the Women’s Center she began to hear “pretty horrific” stories of mothers on campus hiding in janitors closets or sitting on the floor in the bathroom pumping milk for their children. Between the ADVANCE program, a national science grant to promote and retain women in the sciences, the Wellness Program and the Provost’s Office and Facilities, money was generated to create these rooms for parents.

 

“It just seemed like the right thing to do,” Stevens said. “I wouldn’t want to be sitting on the toilet pumping milk or in the janitors closet, so we decided that we needed to provide these around those campus.”

 

Most of the rooms were previously family restrooms, Stevens said. Each room has a toilet and sink, a changing table, a chair for nursing and at least one electrical outlet so women who use electric pumps can use their pumps, she said. Almost all of the rooms are unisex, allowing dads on campus to utilize the changing tables as well.

 

“We wanted to put them in the family rooms as much as possible because we do see a lot of dads,” Stevens said. “The younger generation of men are much more involved with their children than the generation above 45 or so.”

 

The university currently has six lactation rooms located in Family Life 316, Fine Arts 129, the second floor of the TSC, Biology and Natural Resources 116, Engineering 111 and two in the library, one in 134, the other in 236, Stevens said. The Women’s Center is also advocating for lactation rooms to be included in new buildings constructed on campus, Stevens said.

 

 

After receiving a donation from a private donor, the Women’s Center has a very limited amount of grants to give to reentry students to help them receive extra child care during mid-terms and finals week, Stevens said.

 

The grants, which are currently limited to reentry students with preschool-age children, are meant to help students have the extra time they need to study for upcoming exams, she said. It is limited to preschool-age children because they are often more difficult to find care for, Stevens said. In order for a day care to be qualified to watch children under three, they must have more workers for fewer children, she said. It is a harder license to get, Stevens said.

 

Stevens said the Women’s Center hopes one day to be able to expand these grants to include the traditional students, but as of right now there isn’t enough funding.

 

According to information put out by the Women’s Center, for students to be eligible they be enrolled at USU for the semester they are applying. The must take care of the child they are applying for more than 50 percent of the time and have an uncoming midterm or final. The maximum amount student can receive is $200 per year.

 

Applications for mid-term and final grants can be found at the Women’s Center Web site.

 

 

The Child Care Access Means Parents in School program is a program that provides high-quality child care stipends for parents who are going to school, said Ann Austin, director of the CCAMPIS program.

 

The CCAMPIS program is open to anyone attending USU who has children that spend the majority of their time with them, Austin said. In order to be eligible, either one or both parents must be attending school full time and be pell-grant eligible to be considered for the CCAMPIS program, she said. The program pays for child care costs at one of the program’s selected providers.

 

“Our purpose is to put children in high-quality child care,” Austin said. “Some care is of higher quality than other, so children must be put with a CCAMPIS provider.”

 

Along with the CCAMPIS program comes a research component, Austin said. The program studies students who are attending school and being parents at the same time and what resources they need to be able to graduate, she said.

 

“Basically our question is what kinds of resources do parents need to cope with the stress of being students and parents,” Austin said. “We do know that participants in the program graduate at a higher rate than those students who didn’t receive child care help.”

 

For more information about aid available to women at USU, visit the Web site.