Parenting Student Programming

Overview

Over 25%, or more than 17,500, of ACC students are parents. Parenting while being a student comes with special challenges. Parenting students are 50% more likely to leave college with no degree or certificate and accrue on average three times the amount of school-related debt as their non-parenting peers.

To create a parenting student-friendly culture and climate, ACC’s Parenting Student programming brings to light visible and invisible institutional barriers encountered by student parents and seeks to refine policies and procedures that create unintended barriers. Policy changes and programming to support parenting students will improve course completion and persistence rates, as well as general mental health wellness of these students.

The college uses innovative approaches to better support ACC’s parenting students, such as providing additional support for child care scholarships through both greater institutional support and the greatly expanded Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS) grant, participation in Generation Hope’s FamilyU initiative, and the Parenting Student Project (PSP), a collaboration with United Way and funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Dallas Fed.

ACC has hired a consulting firm to provide recommendations that will guide decision making on how ACC creates onsite or near site childcare at multiple campuses across the district.

Accomplishments

Program staff collaborated with the Grants Development Office to apply for the Department of Education’s CCAMPIS grant. As a result of careful planning and innovative program content, DOE awarded ACC nearly four times the amount of ACC’s previous CCAMPIS grant. ACC will receive $1 million per year for the next five years to provide child care for parenting students. Tuition for 14 children of student parents who attend the ACC Child Lab School is fully covered by CCAMPIS. Another 13 children whose parents chose community child care providers have their tuition covered with CCAMPIS funds.

ACC applied for and was selected to participate in Generation Hope’s FamilyU initiative. ACC staff who participate in the project have identified methods for the college to better understand the scope and number of parenting students who attend ACC. They have conducted an environmental scan of on-campus features and have identified policies and procedures that either support or create barriers for parenting students.

The college also participated in the Parenting Student Program to test the assumption that additional financial resources in the form of a monthly stipend designed to incentivize parenting students would increase their persistence and graduation rates. The initial outcomes look promising.

Impact

Child Care Scholarships

• 76.7% of students who received a child care scholarship persisted from the fall to spring semesters, while 26% persisted fall-to-fall (minus 20% who graduated)
• 93% of students who received a child care scholarship and a PSP monthly stipend persisted from the fall to spring semesters, while 82% persisted fall-to-fall (graduates not measured until end of fall 2022)
• 11% of students who received a child care scholarship and 19.2% of students who received a child care scholarship and a PSP monthly stipend graduated following the fall 2022 semester
• 62.5% of student participants are Black or Latinx

Child care consultants have prepared ACC to more fully support parenting students with child care-aged children. They have completed the following:

• A national environmental scan of child care in higher education;
• A scan of child care in the large urban community colleges in Texas;
• A vacancy check on child care providers within 1 mile of each campus;
• A needs assessment using a widely distributed student survey and four focus group discussions with ACC student parents; and
• A preliminary list of recommendations to guide ACC in further developing its child care programming support for student parents (recommendations are currently under review).

Next Steps

The FamilyU team will continue to work on ways to improve data collection and impact policy development, and will support training and workshops for faculty and staff to build momentum for culture change regarding parenting students and the place of the families on ACC campuses. In June 2023, the FamilyU team will select and add a current ACC parenting student as a FamilyU Fellow.

United Way has hired a consultant to develop a return on investment model for the Parenting Student Program. ACC is working with United Way to identify funding opportunities to sustain the program beyond two years.

The report from the child care consultants, with recommendations for increased on-campus or near-campus child care programming is currently under review and will be presented to the chancellor and his cabinet, with a written report prepared for the Board of Trustees for discussion and possible action.