For young parents, new daycare doesn't cut it

Issues concerning graduate students with children are finally reaching Penn's radar, but it may be too little, too late.

Additional facilities to help improve the University's day care are currently under construction at the Penn Children's Center, but graduate students with children say their needs have been overlooked throughout the entire process.

The Penn Children's Center offers childcare to Penn staff, faculty and students, but "the wait list [for services] is over a year," said Meredith Wooten, the Personal Development graduate fellow at the Graduate Student Center. "You'd have to get on there before you [got] pregnant."

Although the Center is adding more classrooms, bathrooms and an additional kitchen to help alleviate these problems, those projects will not necessarily offer relief to graduate students.

"The Children's Center's primary audience [is] Penn faculty and staff," said Rhea Lewis, spokeswoman for Business Services. The Center is "specifically gauging the needs of that audience."

But according to recent data, that audience may not be the only one that has needs.

A survey conducted by the GSC last semester found that there are about 400 graduate students with children, and at least another 120 reported plans to have a baby before they graduate.

In addition, graduate students were not given enough consideration when planning these construction projects, some say.

"The data they used for the expansion only polled faculty and staff to find out what their needs were," Wooten said; graduate students were not asked if their childcare needs were being met.

To deal with these issues, some students, like Lia Howard, a School of Arts and Sciences graduate student and a mother of two, take leaves of absence from their academic programs - which they may do for up to two semesters without being penalized - after giving birth.

"My stipend doesn't really make [childcare] an option," said Howard, who took leaves of absence after each child.

For others, however, leaving is not a viable option.

The GSC survey showed that most students did not know about the leave policy, and that only 55 percent of respondents said they would actually take one.

"There's this idea that, if you take a leave, you aren't serious about the program, and that you're kind of cavalier about being a grad student," Howard said.

Another issue that often emerges for graduate students is health care.

"A serious improvement that would affect me would be to offer dependent coverage," said David Buchta, a first year SAS graduate student and father of two. If Buchta had to use Penn insurance to cover both of his children and his wife, he would be paying almost a third of his yearly $18,000 stipend.

In the meantime, to address growing childcare-related concerns, the GSC has created a Web site that deals exclusively with these issues and has installed a number of baby-changing stations in bathrooms across campus. It also runs a number of family-friendly programs throughout the year.

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