Family Matters
The following letter was first published online by The Post (9/19/07) .
Five months before my son was born, he went on the infants' waiting list at Ohio University's Child Development Center. Twenty-two months later, he's still on the list, now near the top. Come November, though, he'll transfer to a much longer waiting list for toddlers. My wife and I, both full-time faculty members, aren't surprised. Everyone who has children or thinks about having children knows inadequate childcare makes working and raising a family in Athens hard. We all talk, give each other advice, and share stories of our experiences—what the Executive Vice President & Provost's Child Care Task Force (CCTF) distrustfully calls "anecdotes."
The current, incomplete draft of CCTF's report tells us that task force members were familiar with "anecdotal information" about the lack of sufficient childcare in Athens. But a task force is a serious thing, with a mission and a budget, unable to rely on "anecdotal evidence," so this one conducted a survey. Now survey evidence confirms anecdotal evidence: There's not enough childcare.
CCTF plans to run the survey again, at additional expense, seeking evidence from a broader sample of the Athens community. It also recommends spending $40,000 on a new website (with a link to another website) and reprints of an existing brochure in order "to provide better information to faculty, staff, and students on the current availability of child care and to provide assistance on how to be an informed consumer of child care services." How can information be better when the facts (there's not enough childcare) are the same? Human Resources, drawing on unspecified resources, will help "ensure" that parents "remain aware of services and support." But we're well aware of the services and support lacking in our community. Maybe the forty-grand could go somewhere other than a website.
Here's an anecdote. Last year, top O.U. brass jumped a brand new hire, Howard Lipman, to the top of that long Child Development Center waiting list, so that his child started daycare immediately. Lipman, a highly paid administrator (he rented out Baker Center for a private party) was unapologetic: childcare was "very, very important" for him, he explained to The Post (1/25/07). You'd think it was equally important for the parents of the couple hundred other children left behind on the list. But the center's director explained that the waiting list is "a little deceiving." What's also deceitful is providing daycare when it's advantageous to top-earners and leaving the rest of us to wait, wait, wait.
The most concrete CCTF proposal so far is to direct childcare demand away from the university (given the Lipman debacle, that's understandable) and toward a "home-based child care network." Well, one exists, as most Athens parents already know, with its own lengthy waiting lists. Good people are providing excellent care in the Athens area, but they can't come close to matching the demand. If CCTF is aware of this network, then it must be aware that it is stretched to its limits. That's due to word-of-mouth among parents (i.e. "informed consumers"), which we'll always find more useful and reliable than an expensive website.
This academic year the local chapter of the American Association of
University Professors will organize an independent committee to study problems faculty members face with regard to childcare and family matters generally. I invite faculty members to join the committee, provide information (including anecdotes), or help in any way they like by contacting me. This includes full-time or part-time professors, Groups I through IV, and regardless of whether they are dues-paying members of the A.A.U.P. or not.
Once organized, we'll look beyond the faculty and beyond childcare, because families face other challenges. For example, the only paid leave a faculty member can take after the birth or adoption of a child is in the form of accrued "sick days," and even that's not easy. We had plenty of sick days accrued but couldn't use them, because our son was born at the wrong time of year. It was only last year that Faculty Senate voted to bring its own Faculty Handbook in line with the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which became federal law in 1993. This is moving too slow and asking too little.
We may not have the resources to solve childcare, but we can't do much less than the present task force or indeed other governing groups within the university. We will value the anecdotes our colleagues share, because they represent real experience, not pretended responses. And we promise not to give unfair and preferential treatment to select individuals.
Kevin Uhalde
President, AAUP-OU
Five months before my son was born, he went on the infants' waiting list at Ohio University's Child Development Center. Twenty-two months later, he's still on the list, now near the top. Come November, though, he'll transfer to a much longer waiting list for toddlers. My wife and I, both full-time faculty members, aren't surprised. Everyone who has children or thinks about having children knows inadequate childcare makes working and raising a family in Athens hard. We all talk, give each other advice, and share stories of our experiences—what the Executive Vice President & Provost's Child Care Task Force (CCTF) distrustfully calls "anecdotes."
The current, incomplete draft of CCTF's report tells us that task force members were familiar with "anecdotal information" about the lack of sufficient childcare in Athens. But a task force is a serious thing, with a mission and a budget, unable to rely on "anecdotal evidence," so this one conducted a survey. Now survey evidence confirms anecdotal evidence: There's not enough childcare.
CCTF plans to run the survey again, at additional expense, seeking evidence from a broader sample of the Athens community. It also recommends spending $40,000 on a new website (with a link to another website) and reprints of an existing brochure in order "to provide better information to faculty, staff, and students on the current availability of child care and to provide assistance on how to be an informed consumer of child care services." How can information be better when the facts (there's not enough childcare) are the same? Human Resources, drawing on unspecified resources, will help "ensure" that parents "remain aware of services and support." But we're well aware of the services and support lacking in our community. Maybe the forty-grand could go somewhere other than a website.
Here's an anecdote. Last year, top O.U. brass jumped a brand new hire, Howard Lipman, to the top of that long Child Development Center waiting list, so that his child started daycare immediately. Lipman, a highly paid administrator (he rented out Baker Center for a private party) was unapologetic: childcare was "very, very important" for him, he explained to The Post (1/25/07). You'd think it was equally important for the parents of the couple hundred other children left behind on the list. But the center's director explained that the waiting list is "a little deceiving." What's also deceitful is providing daycare when it's advantageous to top-earners and leaving the rest of us to wait, wait, wait.
The most concrete CCTF proposal so far is to direct childcare demand away from the university (given the Lipman debacle, that's understandable) and toward a "home-based child care network." Well, one exists, as most Athens parents already know, with its own lengthy waiting lists. Good people are providing excellent care in the Athens area, but they can't come close to matching the demand. If CCTF is aware of this network, then it must be aware that it is stretched to its limits. That's due to word-of-mouth among parents (i.e. "informed consumers"), which we'll always find more useful and reliable than an expensive website.
This academic year the local chapter of the American Association of
University Professors will organize an independent committee to study problems faculty members face with regard to childcare and family matters generally. I invite faculty members to join the committee, provide information (including anecdotes), or help in any way they like by contacting me. This includes full-time or part-time professors, Groups I through IV, and regardless of whether they are dues-paying members of the A.A.U.P. or not.
Once organized, we'll look beyond the faculty and beyond childcare, because families face other challenges. For example, the only paid leave a faculty member can take after the birth or adoption of a child is in the form of accrued "sick days," and even that's not easy. We had plenty of sick days accrued but couldn't use them, because our son was born at the wrong time of year. It was only last year that Faculty Senate voted to bring its own Faculty Handbook in line with the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which became federal law in 1993. This is moving too slow and asking too little.
We may not have the resources to solve childcare, but we can't do much less than the present task force or indeed other governing groups within the university. We will value the anecdotes our colleagues share, because they represent real experience, not pretended responses. And we promise not to give unfair and preferential treatment to select individuals.
Kevin Uhalde
President, AAUP-OU
posted by AAUP-OU Committee Member at 9:54 AM
<< Home