BMCC DIRECTOR LEADS CRUSADE FOR FEDERAL FUNDING TO HELP LOW-INCOME PARENTS ATTEND COLLEGE
College receives national recognition for service to student parents Eighty-seven colleges and universities providing child care services to low income students will now receive a $4.9-million helping hand from the federal government, thanks to the director of Borough of Manhattan Community College’s Early Childhood Center.
Vice President Al Gore announced that the institutions would receive the federal grant funding as part of the Child Care Access Means Parents in School Program (CAMPUS), a new initiative crafted by BMCC’s Todd Boressoff. The CAMPUS program was created under the Higher Education Act of 1998.
According to Boressoff, the idea to create the CAMPUS initiative occurred to him after seeing the negative effects of welfare reform on the funding of campus child care.
“Before welfare reform,” Boressoff says, “a student parent on public assistance would get support for going to classes and, if the student parent was taking a vocational course of study, the campus child care center would get reimbursed.
“But welfare reform effectively eliminated that source of funding for two-year schools. Our federal funding from that particular stream of funds dropped from $170,000 to $7,000. And we needed to find a way to get that money back.”
Working with the Child Care Counsel at The City University of New York, Boressoff had successfully put together legislation that provided state funding for campus day care. He says the idea occurred to him to try the same thing, but at the federal level.
“I talked to CUNY’s lobbyist, Clyde Aveilhe, in Washington, D.C., and discovered that the reauthorization process for the Higher Education Act was just getting underway,” he says. “It seemed optimal to have our provision be a part of the HEA. I knew if we could access higher ed funding, we wouldn’t be competing with other non-campus day care centers.”
Just prior to this, Boressoff was elected to the board of the National Coalition for Campus Children’s Centers, where he became chair of public policy. The position, Boressoff says, “gave me a national voice,” and helped secure support for the provision, including that of Senators Olympia Snow of Maine and Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, who co-sponsored the CAMPUS Child Care Bill in the U.S. Senate.
BMCC has been awarded the second largest CAMPUS grant in the country, $806,412 over four years. Mr. Boressoff says the funds will be used to expand services to students at the college.
“The center is currently undergoing a renovation,” Boressoff says. “Right now, we can accommodate 70 children. The expansion will allow us to provide services for a maximum of 200. This money, along with state funding The City University of New York received, will allow us to support the additional children and, as a result, support their parents as they earn their college degrees.”
The grants were announced earlier this month by Vice President Gore. In a news release from Vice President Gore’s office, BMCC’s Early Childhood Expansion Project was cited as an example of how federal funding would be used to assist student parents in attending and staying in college.
Boressoff is chair of public policy and a member of the board of the National Coalition for Campus Children’s Centers. He says studies indicate that two out of every three colleges and universities in the U.S. have some form of preschool program, and many of these are without stable financial support.
Renovations of BMCC’s Early Childhood Center began in June and are expected to be completed in February, 2000.
