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In 1989, UAA offered daycare for parents pursuing a higher education. In 2015 that service was shut down leaving families to find care away from campus.
Where did it go and will it ever come back?
Kaycee Davis is a fellow TNL reporter and UAA student. However, in 1991, Davis was a single mother with two daughters attending college here on campus. Her girls, Viktoria and Monica, were in preschool at the time.
Davis said that for her to succeed in school, support and care was needed for her children. Lucky for her, UAA offered daycare through the Tanaina Child Development Center. Davis said that she and her daughters found a community and a family through the college.
Also, professors and other staff with students at UAA could also use the daycare.
Davis said, "Seeing my professors also drop off their children at care had a humanizing effect that showed that professors were just like us student-parents.”
Not only that, the daycare gave opportunities for parents to eat lunch and spend time with their children on campus. An added benefit was that UAA offered not only daycare for the children but a place for them to learn, find friends, grow into their own personalities, and create long-lasting memories.
In addition, it was more than just a daycare. It was also an educational program for students who were pursuing early childhood education degrees. They were employed at the daycare and received the hands-on training necessary to understand the growth of young children. For a time, all was well with the daycare for anyone who needed it.
However in 2015, then UAA chancellor, Tom Case,made the decision to cut the childcare program, operating inside the Student Union at the time. Case was chancellor of UAA from 2011 to 2017.
Case said this about the termination and move of the care center out of UAA and to the Alaska Regional Hospital on the UAA website: “On Jan. 28, the administration chose to end UAA’s formal partnership agreement with Tanaina, which was first signed in 1989. Tanaina is not a UAA function and therefore was not evaluated as a part of UAA’s recent prioritization process. Rather, the decision and timing were due to several factors, including planned renovation of the Wells Fargo Sports Complex where Tanaina is housed, necessary budget cuts, and increasing facility needs for UAA’s 15,000 students.”
Austin Osborne is UAA’s director of marketing and communications. Osborne shed some light on the reasons for daycare termination in 2015, the chances of it coming back, and what it can do for parents who attend and students pursuing an educational degree.
Osborne said that the reason for the removal of the daycare by former Chancellor Case was “due to funding not being available from the legislature to the university, completely cut off,” and that “the legislature made no plan on returning the budget for it.”
Osborne said, “[Chancellor Sean Parnell] is now open to bringing care back for families and staff attending the university, looking around for financing through Grants from the federal government, or even partnerships.”
If childcare comes back, we as a college can continue taking steps toward an in person college experience again. With on campus childcare, current and future students pursuing childhood education degrees may find success; students, staff and other personnel within UAA can also succeed in their individual careers and in school.
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