via Yahoo News: "Build Back Better Has The Potential To Eradicate Many Of The Persistent Challenges Student-Parents Face"
via Yahoo News: "Build Back Better Has The Potential To Eradicate Many Of The Persistent Challenges Student-Parents Face"
by Nicole Lynn Lewis
Twenty years ago, I was a 21-year-old college student staying up late to finish assignments, plotting out my career path between classes and paying $800 a month for childcare. Pulling together the little money I had to cover the tuition payment for my two-year-old daughter every 30 days required creativity, sacrifices and calculation after calculation. It was one of many bills — rent, car repairs, insurance and medications, groceries, gas for my station wagon, etc. — but it was the one that made graduating from William & Mary University as a young mother seem impossible.
Today, not much has changed for parents in college — except the skyrocketing costs of both childcare and earning a degree. Most people still don’t know that student parents exist, and even fewer people factor them in when working to address America’s most pressing issues.
At 25 years old, Araceli is raising four beautiful children in addition to working a full-time job and pursuing her degree at the University of the District of Columbia. She prides herself on being a hands-on mother, but the truth is, having her first child at 15 and trying to complete her education hasn’t been easy.
It has taken superhuman focus and determination to find time or energy after working long shifts to help her nine and 10-year-old boys with homework while her own assignments threatened to keep her up late into the night. She’s had to steal time for studying between feedings for her one-year-old son and girl boss pep talks with her five-year-old daughter. She struggles to coordinate pick-up and drop-off schedules and quality time, dreading the days when the cost of before and aftercare exhausts funds set aside for groceries or utilities.