Colleges Can Provide Drop-in Care

Life as a parent of small children can be logistically challenging. Every parent knows the Tetris-like challenge of piecing together childcare that covers a full workday. The stakes of this “game” are particularly high for parenting college students. If the care students cobble together falls through because of weather or illness, they could fall behind in their classes and eventually have to stop their studies, jeopardizing the investment in their education. That’s why a place to drop your kid on campus while you attend class is so valuable.

Gyms know the challenge of finding care for busy parents, so many provide a place for members to drop their kids while they work out. And more community colleges are figuring out how to pull this off for their students so they can attend class. As one student, Andrew, at Mount Wachusett Community College put it, “My kids had school vacation this week, and I was still able to attend my classes. This is an amazing resource, knowing my kids were cared for and I didn’t have to miss any class time!”

Although students like Andrew report that drop-in care can be crucial to continuing their education, it is still rare at community colleges. Schools provide drop-in care in a couple of ways. It can be emergency care where a student can simply walk in with their child and drop them off for a set period, or it can be prescheduled to reserve a slot for the child. Most schools try to provide both.

In interviews with staff at ten community colleges, New America heard concerns about costs, licensure, logistics, space constraints, and liability issues. These challenges are real, but they are also surmountable. In this post, we describe several drop-in care programs at community colleges before explaining how colleges tackled each challenge.

The Community Colleges Pulling It Off

Building on its flexible child care center, Utah Valley University, the largest public university in Utah with bachelor's and associate's degrees, opened a drop-in childcare center called Hourly Kit Care. Each day, the service provides eight openings for children ages zero to two years and 23 openings for ages three to 12. Children can stay up to three hours a day, and parents are charged in 30-minute increments at six dollars an hour. The center accommodates scheduled and walk-in drop-offs using Cojilio, an all-in-one booking and appointment payment software.

Mount Wachusett Community College in Massachusetts created a drop-in service that children can use up to four hours a day. After completing a year-long study with the Family Friendly Campus Toolkit, staff identified a need for drop-in care. In response, they launched Child Watch, drawing on federal CCAMPIS grant funding and other small grants. The drop-in program employs parents, Early Childhood Education (ECE) students, and students in other majors with Federal Work Study funding and other small local grants to watch the children with a three-to-one ratio. They currently serve children from 10 months, although most are ages five to eight. During school breaks, enrollment can surge to around 50 children a week, but typically, they serve around 20 to 26. Even though the drop-in care is running, finding a good scheduling solution has been challenging. Currently, scheduling, sometimes done by hand, takes much of the time of the staff person in charge of all student-parent support.

Other colleges are partnering with off-campus providers for drop-in care. In North Carolina, Forsyth Tech partners with KidSpot, a drop-in child care center just down the street from its main campus. KidSpot directly bills the college for the children who use the service, so students only have to pay a one-time registration fee of $25, and then they can use the service for free. KidSpot pricing starts at $10 an hour for the first child, with discounts for successive children. With an increasing number of students using the service, this has become expensive for the college, leading them to explore starting a drop-in care on their campus.

Madison College has partnered with the Dane County YMCA to provide students with drop-in childcare and family wellness activities. The $12,000 per year contract, funded by the Wisconsin Innovation Grant (supported with federal pandemic dollars), allows students to use the YMCA’s childcare services while in the building. There is also drop-in care for a fee on days when public schools are closed. While staff felt students liked the program, students have only lightly used it. Dallas College partnered with the YMCA to bring drop-in care to its El Centro Campus. The Child Watch Program serves children three to 12 and provides 20 spots each hour on a first-come, first-served basis for up to four hours a day.

Meeting the Challenges of Offering Drop-In Care

Each of these schools successfully launched drop-in care despite funding, space, liability, and other challenges. While none of these colleges found perfect solutions to every obstacle, their experience shows that drop-in care is possible and offers lessons for other colleges.

Funding. Sustainable funding is a perpetual challenge in child care support, and drop-in care is no exception. Mount Wachusett and Forsyth Tech have worked with the colleges’ foundations to fundraise private support for drop-in care. Both colleges have also used CCAMPIS grants to support some aspects of their drop-in care. Utah Valley University charges parents a little to access the program, which can help with financial sustainability. Mount Wachusett Community College uses Federal Work Study to recruit and pay the five students working at the center.

Liability. We also heard liability concerns; most programs we found have parents sign waivers. However, there is also a lot of variety in what the college legal counsel is comfortable with. For instance, one community college offers educational instruction for children during their parents' classes, allowing children to be covered under the college's existing student liability insurance.

Licensure. Licensure rules can be challenging for drop-in care programs. Luckily, most states have regulations that allow specific care to be licensure-exempt, like kids’ summer camps and drop-in care. State requirements for licensure exemptions vary widely, and programs must often still describe and file their programs with the state, even when exempt. For instance, in Massachusetts, there is a “not separated from guardian” exception to licensure, which means parents must be on the premises and available for diaper changes or feeding. As a result, students using Mount Wachusetts drop-in care must be ready to duck out of class to change a diaper. In North Carolina, programs do not need to be licensed if children are served four hours or less daily, allowing business models like KidSpot.

Logistics. Another big challenge is managing the logistics of running a drop-in care program. When you don’t know how many kids you will watch daily, arranging schedules and staffing can be hard. It can also be challenging to ensure that students learn about the drop-in option and can sign up quickly, right before they need the service. At Mount Wachusett Community College, scheduling is done by hand and takes up much of the time of the staff person in charge of all student-parent support. Some community colleges cannot meet the need for flexibility, so they pre-schedule almost all children served. To ensure drop-in care remains available for emergency and last-minute needs, colleges can help parenting students complete required paperwork in advance and invest in scheduling software, as Utah Valley University did.

Relationship with Early Childhood Staff. Several of the colleges we have spoken to also had issues getting buy-in for drop-in care because their Early Childhood Education staff were worried about the quality of the care. By employing ECE students as Federal Work Study students, Mount Wachusett built program support for the effort. Framing drop-in care to serve a different function than on-campus center care may also help gain support from ECE professors and on-campus childcare staff. Unlike center-based care, which focuses on regular, high-quality, educational programming, drop-in care is designed for occasional use during a limited time or when regular arrangements fall through. Separating the on-campus center and drop-in care can also assuage worries that drop-in care will imperil the accreditation or licensure of center-based care.

Space. Colleges also must find adequate space for drop-in care. At Quinsigamond Community College, which is just now setting up a drop-in care program, staff worked hard to find an existing open space conveniently and centrally located and in an area where children would not disturb other students. The challenge of finding appropriate space is compounded by the difficulty of using the space of a licensed child care center for unlicensed care. Often, on-campus licensed child care centers will not allow their space to be used for unlicensed care when closed, aggravating the need for drop-in care to find space to operate. Colleges should check their state licensure requirements to see what they can offer on campus.

Conclusion

Offering drop-in care can transform the lives of student parents. It can also be logistically and legally challenging for colleges, but solutions exist. Colleges interested in pursuing drop-in care should ask their student parents about the demand for this service using surveys or focus groups. Once they have established demand, colleges must explore their state’s licensure exemptions, develop a staffing plan, and find a funding stream, space, and a scheduling solution. The benefit to students can be worth meeting those challenges.