UT increases initiatives to support student parents

When Rick Champlain leaves campus, he switches from “student mode” to parent. He knows that when he gets home, his time will not be his own until his 5-year-old and 7-year-old sleep.

“Your life basically belongs to somebody else,” Champlain said. “And you have to make sure that your kids are taken care of before you can worry about studying for midterms.”

Champlain is one of a handful of students who is a student parent pursuing an undergraduate degree at the University of Texas at Austin. The university does not have a standard in place for identifying student parents, which leads to problems for parents concerning registration and other resources, Champlain said.

“No resources have been geared toward me particularly,” Champlain said.

Champlain is a 40-year-old history senior with the U-Teach program, which prepares UT students for teaching after college. He served in the military and then as a firefighter before entering UT last fall. One of the hardest parts about being a student parent is juggling obligations of both roles, Champlain said.

“God forbid, you know, my son has a T-ball game or my daughter has cheerleading or a Girl Scout meeting,” Champlain said. “Then I write that night off completely or stay up until the wee hours of the morning.”

Champlain said his life would be easier if he had a community of parents to lean on at UT, but most of the older students like him do not have dependents. Official support from the school would also help, Champlain said.

Micheal Knox works as a student development specialist with UT to manage programming and new initiatives for non-traditional students. Recently, Knox said, the office has generated a majority of resources and ideas to assist student parents.

Included in these ideas are mandated parental accommodations that allow excused absences and modified responsibility of assignments. They are looking to combine resources with the graduate school to put these ideas into action.

“We know there’s a need, and we are addressing that need,” Knox said.

Knox said privacy rules make it hard to identify student parents. But a new initiative will have students identify themselves during the admissions process, which will help the university find parents and direct support to them.

“The campus is so big, we can’t find everyone,” Knox said. “That’s the problem. We need to find that population and keep them in the loop.”

Lily Yeager is a pre-med sophomore who is raising a 2-year-old as a single parent. At the beginning of the spring, Yeager was scheduled for a science lab but couldn’t attend because the course fell outside of her child’s daycare hours.

“I had reached out to the department of physics with my situation and never heard back so I went (to the office) and they were like, ‘We can’t do anything but wait,’” Yeager said.

She was eventually able to get into the lab but not without advocating for herself multiple times. Yeager said if the school is taking initiative to help students parents, she wants to be informed on those initiatives.

“I would love to know ways to keep up with what is changing because I am definitely directly affected, but I never know where to check,” Yeager said. “I just assume that nothing is changing.”

Yeager said she originally tried to enroll her child at UT’s Child Development Center for daycare. However, she said she felt discouraged because students must pay $100 to get on the waitlist and wait three years to obtain a daycare spot.

The center’s coordinator, Hara Cootes, said the center accommodates children of both faculty and students. The center now has 58 children of student parents and 480 children in total.

“We are a high quality program at a lower cost,” Cootes said.

UT’s Student Government also passed a resolution in support of a non-traditional student center two weeks ago. Student representatives will present the legislation to President Gregory Fenves at the end of April.

According to the legislation, The Non-Traditional Center aims to further integrate transfer students into student life and serve as a social hub for non-traditional students on campus.

“There was a time where I brought my daughter with me while I was walking through campus and I felt like people were whispering and looking at me like, ‘What the heck?’” Yeager said. “I think having a study place where it’s normalized to bring your child would help me feel more accepted.”