Kela King had two children by the time she was 17 years old. She dropped out of high school, received her GED, and for 13 years has struggled to complete her college degree as a working mother.

When King, now 35 and a mother of three, failed two classes last year because she was focused on her children’s needs, she wondered if she was ever going to graduate. But with the support of the student parent success program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee — which helped her navigate her studies while working — she hopes to walk across the stage in December 2026.

“I’m building this legacy,” King said. “Even if I don’t get to where I want to be, you’ll be able to see the legacy just in the building.”

For King and many other student parents, attending college can be a very tough road. Obstacles like financial stress, balancing coursework with family responsibilities and finding affordable, quality child care make it difficult for students raising children. 

Parents make up about and according to , which provides research and resources for pregnant and parenting students. They represent a diverse population, including a significant share of , , and individuals from Student parents face especially steep challenges and are than those without children to leave college before completing their degrees.

These students have unique needs, and a growing body of points to that colleges and universities can take to help them flourish and graduate. Successful practices include: Offering child care on or near campus with financial assistance to cover or subsidize the cost; providing access to food and other basic necessities; building a student parent support center; and creating opportunities for peer community building. 

There’s a key — Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS) — that helps colleges and universities support students like King by subsidizing child care and funding support services for student parents. But the program has come under threat recently. Last year, the federal government abruptly CCAMPIS grants for about a dozen colleges that depend on the funding. 

The future of the program’s funding has been precarious for some time, but in February, after facing potential elimination under the Trump administration for months, Congress approved the final 2026 federal budget, maintaining CCAMPIS funding at , the same as it was in 2025. This brought relief to some higher education institutions, but not for the colleges that saw their grants terminated.

Financial cuts to programs that support student parents will certainly hamper efforts to serve these students — especially through child care — but advocates say there are actions campus leaders can do to help them persist and thrive.

“Child care is huge, but it’s not the only thing that’s necessary for parenting students to be successful,” said Nicole Lynn Lewis, executive director of , a nonprofit that supports student parents in college. “We also want to see, across the institution, real intentionality around supporting these students. And sometimes that’s low hanging fruit at no cost or low cost.” 

For example, if a higher education institution simply shows student parents in its marketing material, it would send a message “that I belong here,” she said.

While more research on outcomes is needed, said Theresa Anderson, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, some have shown that initiatives such as a student parent resource coordinator, regular peer meetings and monthly stipends help by increasing graduation rates and offering a . Anderson has also found in her that parents who receive a college degree typically earn more than those of similar socioeconomic status without a degree, which suggests the importance of bolstering support for student parents. 

The question for colleges and universities is how to translate research on what helps student parents thrive into reality — and in ways that suit their specific type of institution. About half of student parents attend community colleges, while 20% attend private, for-profit institutions and a combined 29% attend public or private nonprofit institutions, according to by the SPARK Collaborative. They tend to have as high or higher grade point averages than their non-parent peers, but they are also to graduate from college within six years than those peers. 

Changing that dropout rate is one of the goals of Howard Community College in Columbia, Maryland. Over the past four years, it has stepped up its services for student parents. The institution’s progress includes big-ticket items such as reopening its child care facility — which closed during COVID — and starting a that offers scholarships and wraparound services, including case management and academic coaching. Howard has also offered changes resulting in smaller, but still significant benefits, such as priority class registration.

For its efforts, the college last year was awarded a by Generation Hope. The seal, which the organization has given to 22 higher education institutions and nonprofits, recognizes “exemplary, measurable efforts in supporting parenting students.”

Celeste Ampaah, 23, and the mother of a 5-year old, said she first felt unseen on the Howard college campus. “I didn’t even know that there were any other parents on campus, especially people that were my age,” she said. And she wasn’t aware of the resources the college offered. 

She was leery about letting her professors know she had a child, afraid it would seem like she was asking for special privileges or making excuses.

“I just stopped going to class if I had a hardship,” she said. 

But that changed once she connected with Howard’s resources for student parents and became a parent scholar. Now she proudly carries the backpack that proclaims “Student Parent” below the Howard logo and reaches out to other parents. 

“I’m not ashamed anymore,” she said.

Priority class registration is one benefit Ampaah says is an enormous help. “Being able to plan my classes and work around my schedule before everyone else jumps on board feels like a luxury,” she said. 

There is room for improvement, she noted, including displaying resources for parents on the college’s website more prominently, and training faculty and staff to be more aware of student parents on campus and the difficulties they face.

Some of the obstacles that affect student parents, such as transportation costs, also impact many low-income students, so the goal is to connect those students with the services already available, said Maya Mechenbier, a fellow at the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation at Georgetown University who co-authored a recent of the needs of student parents in Maryland. 

In an interview for the study, Mechenbier recalled, “one mother shared that having to walk across campus or use public transportation while quite pregnant was a big barrier for her. Had she known about transportation subsidies sooner, she might have not had to drop out at that time.”

For that reason priority parking for student parents is a welcome benefit, something California Polytechnic State University (CalPoly), a four-year university that is part of the California State University system offers. 

The university has also garnered the FamilyU Seal for its parent-friendly services. Much of the institution’s progress has been led by Tina Cheuk, an associate professor of education, who was a student parent herself when in graduate school at Stanford University.

It was about a decade ago, and she felt completely isolated, Cheuk said. She recalled asking for a quiet place to breastfeed her daughter — a lactation room — and being told it simply wasn’t possible.

She threatened to file a case with the U.S. Office of Civil Rights and ultimately received the space she needed. And that started her on the road to become a student parent advocate at Stanford and later at Cal Poly.

A student parent at Cal Poly won’t run into Cheuk’s problem today, as the university now offers . There is also on-site child care and a coordinator for student parents within the student affairs office. In addition, there are community events for families — and at graduation, children receive some regalia and walk across the stage with their parents.  

Some of these supports are mandated under California state law, which that public colleges and universities give student parents priority registration and provide a “clearly visible” on the institution’s website outlining resources available to such parents, as well as a designated support person.

The law, Cheuk said, “serves as a minimum. But if all can meet that minimum, that is a signal to potential students that there are resources.”

More states and colleges are recognizing that in order to serve student parents, it’s important to about their lived experiences. But one of the sticking points around serving this population, experts say, is simply identifying who they are.

There is no federal mandate to collect such numbers and a tool that many colleges used — a question on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form that asked if students had dependents — when the form was simplified for the 2024-25 academic year. 

While the FAFSA number wouldn’t have included international students or those who didn’t apply for financial aid, it was one data point.

“Without such data, it’s difficult to understand the characteristics of those students, which programs they’re in, and where they’re facing roadblocks and barriers,” Anderson said.

Five states — California, Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon and Texas — requiring student parents to be counted. The Urban Institute has awarded grants to 23 higher education institutions, including Cal Poly, through its , as an effort to develop best practices for colleges to identify student parents in their data systems. 

For example, Cheuk said students could be asked if they have dependents when filling out an intake enrollment; California community colleges already do that during their application process. 

Some colleges — even ones that implement best practices — are struggling in the face of rollbacks. UW-Milwaukee has had an on-site child care facility for more than 50 years and a longstanding wraparound and scholarship program aimed at serving student parents, said Rachel Kubczak, the manager of UW-Milwaukee’s who has been working with student parents at the institution for the past decade. She is also King’s advisor.

The child care facility is still operating robustly, but when UW-Milwaukee last year, Kuczak said, many students had to scramble to cover the child-care subsidies they lost through that program or simply reduce their child-care hours, which affected their ability to work and go to classes.

In addition, the university’s wraparound program was supported through one generous grant from 2005 that ended in 2021. That left Kubczak, as the only full-time staff member, struggling to figure out how to serve these students. 

But even without the funding she needs, Kubczak offers crucial types of support — often partnering with other campus centers — such as welcome orientations, coffee and pastry mornings, parenting workshops and assistance in navigating the system.

And she can chalk up some wins, she said, such as getting diaper changing decks in most bathrooms on campus, as well as safe and comfortable lactation rooms. 

There are also success stories, like King’s, Kubczak added. King, who is majoring in social work and minoring in American Sign Language is on track to graduate this year.

“As a teen mom, I’ve been counted out by family members saying I couldn’t do it,” said King. But Kubczak “pushed me and supported me.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Kela King’s job and marital status. She’s currently married and working at a nonprofit.

Editor’s note: This article is part of a series on the intersections of community colleges and child care. .

Community college students are often balancing lives and responsibilities outside of school — from work to family obligations. For students with young children, the struggle to find and afford child care can make a tricky balance close to impossible.

Colleges across the state are finding ways to lessen the burden of child care challenges for their students and communities, from providing on-campus child care and subsidies to strengthening and expanding the child care workforce.

And state leaders are calling for more colleges to follow suit.

“I’ve been saying, all of the 58 need to have child care,” said — referring to the state’s 58 community colleges — at the December 2025 meeting of the , which he co-chairs.

On-campus child care is also a priority of Lt. Gov. Rachel Hunt, a Democrat, who co-chairs the task force with Burgin. Hunt’s says on-campus centers would “leverage our excellent community colleges, strengthen experiential programs for child care professionals, and increase options for students and working families.”

Child care is a critical yet for colleges and policymakers to consider as they work toward and reengage . Models and investments that provide child care for parents as they earn credentials and degrees matter for student access, , and , research says. These strategies also have intergenerational benefits, , relieving families from poverty while exposing children to high-quality early childhood experiences.

When students cannot access or afford care, it risks “their personal investment in education and federal and state investments in postsecondary success,” who studied student parents’ experiences and colleges’ child care approaches at 10 community colleges across the country, including in Winston-Salem.

“Within a broken child care system, colleges alone can’t solve the workforce, supply, quality, and affordability issues that plague families, providers, and communities,” the New America researchers write. “Still, there is reason for hope, and colleges can adopt strategies to better meet the needs of their parenting students.”

Community college students with young children face the same child care crisis all families are experiencing.

About 44% of the child care need in North Carolina was unmet by its supply, according to using 2020 data by the Buffett Early Childhood Institute at the University of Nebraska. The analysis identified 257,670 children without access to child care within a reasonable distance.

The following map shows the real-time supply of North Carolina licensed child care providers — as well as all 58 community colleges, including their satellite campuses. Use the filters to explore availability through different geographic lenses: by congressional or state legislative districts, counties, regions, or census tracts.

If a region is red, that signifies a child care supply and demand gap, or a “desert,” which in this map means there are at least 50 children with all parents working and that there are at least three children per child care slot in that area.

The map defaults to showing regions as the geographic boundary. To view child care “deserts,” toggle on smaller geographic boundaries. For example, when viewing the map by county, eight counties are red. When viewing the map by census tract, many more areas are red.

The orange circles with graduation caps represent community college campuses. The inclusion of community college campuses on this map allows community college leaders to assess if they have available space, on a main or satellite campus, that is located in a child care desert.

Click on a county or region for more information, including the average cost of child care, median family income, and the types of child care programs in the area.

This map was developed by Child Care Resources Inc. (CCRI) in partnership with NC Child Care Resource & Referral and the NC Division of Child Development and Early Education.

The number of licensed child care programs in the state by 5.8% during the five years when providers were receiving pandemic-era stabilization grants, first from the federal American Rescue Plan Act and then partially continued by the state legislature.

to 6.1% between March 2025, when those grants ended, and September 2025. Family child care homes, licensed home-based child care programs, made up 97% of that net loss.

Advocates have called for child care investments since the pandemic brought increased costs and increased competition for employees. Providers were able to raise teacher wages with the infusion of stabilization grants. Without it, they are struggling to compete with retail and food service jobs. This leaves them stuck between increasing tuition for parents who cannot afford to pay more and losing teachers who cannot afford to make less.

The average cost of child care statewide is $10,481 per year, according to state data in the above map. The median wage for child care workers was $14.20 in 2024, .

Advocates say state and federal public investments are necessary to create a system that provides high-quality care and education at a price that is affordable to families.

Research has linked high-quality early care and education with higher academic, social, and economic outcomes for students and communities. In North Carolina, affordable, accessible child care up to 68,000 jobs, increase the state’s annual economic input by up to $13.3 billion, and boost its GDP by up to $7.5 billion, according to from the state Department of Commerce and nonprofit NC Child.

Child care access matters for community college students

Child care access can be a make-or-break factor for student parents. Seventy-one percent of caregiving students nationwide reported that their caregiving responsibilities could lead them to dropping out of community college in the .

The same survey found student parents were highly motivated to succeed. They were less likely than students without caregiving responsibilities to cite academic unpreparedness as a reason for stopping out. Caregiving students reported higher engagement across benchmarks like academic challenge, student effort, and student-faculty interaction compared to students without caregiving responsibilities. Caregiving students also reported higher GPAs than their non-caregiving peers.

This is despite many factors that “could pose challenges to student engagement” — parent students were more likely to be older, to be women, to be first-generation, to be Pell-eligible, and to be working 30 hours or more per week compared to non-caregiving students.

Student parents who persist through a credential or degree are more likely to attend colleges that provide child care supports like full-time care, drop-in care, or subsidies — as well as support with basic needs — than student parents who drop out, according to .

The same research found child care services like full-time and drop-in care could be the convincing factor for a little over half of students surveyed who stopped out to come back to school. Free tuition was the top factor, with 72% of student parents reporting they would return if the cost of tuition was covered.

EdNC has identified three primary ways community colleges can strengthen child care access and affordability: providing on-campus child care, utilizing the state’s child care grant program, and expanding the early childhood workforce, including through child care academies.

Providing campus-based child care

Community colleges across North Carolina are supporting student parents’ child care access, from hosting full-time, on-campus centers to providing drop-in and after-school options.

Colleges have fewer on-campus child care options than they used to. of federal data, 29 community colleges in North Carolina offered dependent care on campus in 2004.

In May 2025, there were 17 colleges offering on-campus child care, according to EdNC’s analysis. Twenty-one colleges had closed on-campus child care, and 20 had never operated on-campus child care, based on what our analysis was able to document.

The on-campus child care programs that remain vary in their design — from operating hours to funding sources and populations served — but can provide starting points for colleges looking to expand access in their regions.

Thirteen of the 17 colleges providing on-campus care are . Three are Head Start programs, and at least five offer .

According to EdNC’s analysis, five child care models exist at community colleges across the state:

• Licensed, on-campus child care, currently provided at 13 community colleges;
• Both licensed, on-campus child care and drop-in care, currently provided at Cape Fear Community College (operating both) and Forsyth Technical Community College (operating a lab, outsourcing drop in care to a local provider, and providing care for particular on-campus events);
• Head Start, currently at Blue Ridge Community College, Halifax Community College, and Lenoir Community College;
• After-school and drop-in care, currently provided at Sandhills Community College; and
• Drop-in care, currently provided at Central Carolina Community College.

The programs braid parent tuition, along with federal, state, and local private and public funding streams, to operate their programs.

They simultaneously support student parents and their children. Kids on Campus, a national effort to expand on-campus Head Start programs from the (ACCT) and the  (NHSA), says providing child care to community college students can have lasting, two-generation effects.

“Two of the most effective strategies for reducing poverty,” says a March 2025 Kids on Campus , “are providing high-quality early childhood education for young children and supporting parents through education and training that will advance their career goals.”

Full-time, formal child care centers are not the only strategy available to colleges. They also do not always meet the needs of parenting students, according to New America’s research. Colleges should consider options like drop-in care, after-school care for older children, and financial support for off-campus options that work with students’ schedules like family child care homes or informal care arrangements with family and friends.

Drop-in care, which in North Carolina is limited to four hours per day, can provide more flexible options for students needing irregular or unpredictable care. Cape Fear Community College (CFCC) launched its drop-in care model at no cost to students. The program is partly funded through a grant from the , created by the New Hanover County Board of Commissioners from the sale of New Hanover Regional Medical Center to Novant Health in 2020.

The program has since moved to a more accessible location for children on campus and doubled the number of children it can serve at once from 20 to 40 students.

In 2025, CFCC President Jim Morton told EdNC that he offers this advice to other community college leaders:

You’re here to serve a community, and to educate and train them so they can have a livable wage and a higher standard of living… Child care is really a big challenge and, next to financial need, that was always one of the higher needs… There are so many issues and other reasons for students to drop out, and so when we find them, we try to pick them off where we can.

— CFCC President Jim Morton

Parents’ child care needs do not stop when young children enter school. At , school-age children of students and staff can attend after-school programming through an on-site partnership with Boys & Girls Club of America.

Students also often need evening or weekend care. Additionally, students might need or prefer access to family child care homes, which are more likely to meet those needs at irregular hours, and family, friend, and neighbor care.

Asking students about their caregiving roles and needs is a crucial first step in supporting parenting students, the New America report found. Then, colleges should use those insights to design their approaches both for direct service provision and financial support.

Utilizing the state’s unique child care grant program

Child care costs make it harder for student parents to afford college. , released in September 2025, provides a new way for colleges and policymakers to think about affordability by including costs outside of tuition, including child care.

In 2019, the organization’s “dispelled the myth that a student can still work their way through college in a minimum-wage job.” Then the organization decided to look at the finances of student parents, aiming to calculate “the actual annual cost of pursuing a degree.”

In North Carolina, child care and other costs like housing and transportation mean community college parenting students pay, on average, $16,700 more per year than their non-parenting peers.

When taking into account these costs relative to student income and other grant supports, the average affordability gap for student parents in the state is $19,645, which would require 54.2 hours of work per week at minimum wage to close. That’s compared to an affordability gap for non-parenting students of $2,993, which would require 8.3 hours of work per week at minimum wage to close.

North Carolina is one of only five states that allocates funding for child care grants for community college students.

In 2024-25, the state allotted just over $3 million for the , distributed across all 58 community colleges. Each college received a base $20,000 allotment, plus $10.16 per full-time equivalent student the college was budgeted to serve. Eighty-four percent of the funding was spent, up from about 77% in the 2023-24 year. The average grant award was $3,726.34, and 737 students received funding.

Not all of the funding was used in the 2024-25 fiscal year, but $211,000 more in grant funding was disbursed than in the previous year.

The grants can help students pay for licensed or unlicensed care from individuals or organizations. Grant funds can cover the cost of child care provided by nannies, relatives, after-school programs, and licensed and unlicensed providers, but not parents themselves. Students must provide an invoice after child care services are provided that passes “a reasonable test for cost.”

Colleges are supposed to work with local social services agencies that distribute child care subsidy funding to coordinate aid for students. Colleges should not require official documentation of students’ subsidy application and denial if it creates a barrier or is too time-consuming, Brenda Burgess, associate director of student aid at community college system, told EdNC.

The timing of the state budget and the reimbursement model make it challenging for colleges to get all available funds to student parents. For example, when a budget is not passed by the time classes start in August, community colleges do not receive the grant funds until after the semester begins. Once they do, some parents have made other arrangements. A community college system said the delays cause some students to postpone enrollment.

The same report states that having to reimburse students or providers after services are given creates challenges. Students often cannot afford to make up-front payments, even if reimbursed down the line, and child care providers rely on timely payments.

Some colleges are tweaking policies and taking advantage of the grant program’s flexibilities to ensure the grants reach the students who need them and do not cause unnecessary stress for students, providers, or college staff. Read more about how colleges can make the grant work best:

Training child care teachers, launching academies

Community colleges do not just support the child care needs of their own students. They also expand child care capacity by serving as the main sites for the education and training of the early childhood workforce, including child care professionals.

There were 5,524 students enrolled in the early childhood education curriculum program across North Carolina community colleges , up 5% from the year before and nearly reaching pre-pandemic enrollment levels.

North Carolina is home to several programs that provide financial assistance to early childhood professionals looking to further their education, most often at community colleges. , from the nonprofit , assist child care teachers with the cost of tuition for associate, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees. , from the same organization, provides wage supplements for child care teachers based on their education level. , expanded and financially supported by a recent effort called , provide pathways for new and seasoned early childhood teachers to work and go to school at the same time while increasing their compensation.

Beyond providing multiple early childhood curriculum programs, community colleges also offer alternatives for individuals to receive the , which is required to be a lead teacher in a licensed child care classroom.

With the industry , fast-track options called “child care academies” emerged in the last two years as another quick and affordable option for individuals interested in working in child care.

In September 2025, at least 11 of these academies operating across the state, which prepare teachers through anywhere from 20 to 64 hours of class time to enter the classroom at little to no cost to the participant. These models were started and operated by a combination of community colleges and local early childhood organizations like Smart Start partnerships and Child Care Resource & Referral (CCR&R) agencies. Most were partnerships between at least two of these institutions.

These academies differ depending on local priorities. Some academies, which EdNC’s analysis described as the “classroom-ready model,” give individuals what they need to start working in the classroom, including providing basic health and safety training and covering criminal background checks required to work in licensed settings.

A second approach to these academies, described by EdNC’s analysis as the “teaching credential model,” takes the basic training from the classroom-ready model and adds coursework from EDU 119, the introductory early childhood community college course. This model gives teachers a continuing education credit (EDU 3119) that they can then build upon at any community college and provides teachers with the credential required to be a lead teacher.

In December, the state Division of Child Development and Early Education, under the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services, with 16 institutions of higher education — 13 of which are community colleges — to launch new child care academies. Each institution is expected to operate at least three academies through July 2026. The models are funded through the federal .

“North Carolina’s early learning system depends on a strong, well-prepared workforce, and the Child Care Academies are designed to meet that need head on,” said DHHS Deputy Secretary for Opportunity and Well-Being Michael Leighs . “By providing free high-quality training, we’re opening doors for new educators while supporting families and ensuring children across our state have access to safe and nurturing care.”

The following colleges received funding to start academies:

• Appalachian State University
• Bladen Community College
• Central Carolina Community College
• Central Piedmont Community College
• Davidson-Davie Community College
• Durham Technical Community College
• Elizabeth City State University
• Forsyth Technical Community College
• Guilford Technical Community College
• Montgomery Community College
• Nash Community College
• Pitt Community College
• Roanoke-Chowan Community College
• Sandhills Community College
• The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Wilson Community College

Shifting culture

The New America research project of 10 community colleges’ approaches to supporting parenting students’ child care needs led to recommendations and for .

In addition to models like on-campus care and subsidies, the project recommended several ways to integrate child care and family-friendly policies into colleges’ overall approaches.

Colleges, the researchers write, should include child care when writing their strategic plans and equity goals. They should collect data on students’ caregiving roles and needs. And they should consider centralizing child care services and/or coordinating with student services like housing referrals, food assistance, and transportation help.

“Such models ensure parenting students aren’t left to piece together services on their own,” the report says. “They address the reality of time poverty and can improve retention and completion.”

The report references Forsyth Tech’s as an example of a one-stop shop that improves student parents’ experiences accessing several kinds of support.

Maya Clay, a Forsyth Tech student parent , said the support of SPARC and Shanta Reddick, director of and adult learner success, “was like hope brightening my future.”

“Being able to have somebody in your corner, who just wasn’t there to support you financially but emotionally, and like making sure you’re successful, and being able to link you to other resources, makes being a student parent here so different,” Clay said.

Partnering with early childhood support organizations and adopting family-friendly policies make a difference in campus culture and student success, according to the New America research project.

In North Carolina, some colleges are co-locating or partnering with Smart Start partnerships and CCR&R agencies. These organizations’ staff have expertise in connecting parents with child care options and other family resources.

Forsyth Tech’s Reddick has a close relationship with a local CCR&R coordinator, which, the New America report found, facilitates “warm hand-offs and personalized referrals.”

(BCC) is using a former elementary school to co-locate Bladen Smart Start’s headquarters and the college’s culinary and agribusiness programs. Additionally, four classrooms have been set aside with future plans for child care for the children of parents.

The effort is the result of collaboration between BCC, the Bladen County Board of Commissioners,  (BCS), and .

The New America research says family-friendly policies beyond child care are also important, including virtual options for students when child care arrangements fall through and clarification on when children are welcome on campus.

In addition to providing after-school care for students’ families and community members, is also the only community college in the state designated a employer, a certification workplaces receive when their policies reflect best practices in early childhood and family well-being.

The certification, the effort’s website reads, “is not just a badge. It’s a marker on your journey to create a family friendly workplace, and sends a clear message: you care about your employees, their families, and their children — the future workforce of North Carolina.”

Sandhills has prioritized creating a family-friendly workplace by providing after-school and drop-in care, paid parental leave, flexible work options, among other policies.

“Invest in your employees, their values, and their families, and they’re going to work harder for you. It’s a pretty simple concept,” said Taylor McCaskill, the college’s senior director of workforce development and corporate partnerships, as reported by Alexandra Quintero.

Sandhills also has plans to open a Center for Excellence in Child Care through a partnership between the college, (the local Smart Start partnership for Moore County), Southern Pines Land & Housing Trust, and the Moore County Chamber of Commerce.

The project, which is still in the fundraising stages, would renovate two buildings. One would be a high-quality child care program to serve the neighborhood and act as a lab school for community college students studying early childhood to observe best practices and gain hands-on experience in the classroom. The second building would house both early childhood faculty from the community college and the staff of Partners for Children & Families. Co-locating the staff would help to provide coordinated wrap-around family support, said Stuart Mills, executive director of Partners for Children & Families.

Mills emphasized that the project is born out of an ongoing, close partnership between the organization and the college, and is just one example of the ways they collaborate. Smart Start staff provide training at the local child care academies, some of which are housed at the community college. Two members of the college staff serve on the organization’s board of directors. And both Partners for Children & Families and the college are leading members of the local Chamber of Commerce’s Child Care Task Force, which is working on long-term child care solutions for the entire community.

Community college faculty and leaders are participating in similar local task forces across the state. The task forces are often hosted and convened by chambers of commerce.

Community colleges have a role in advocating for systemic solutions, , one of the New America researchers.

“By supporting early education advocacy in their communities, they can help secure the child care infrastructure that both parenting students and their employees need,” Baker writes.

When community college child care efforts are supported by outside funding, they can be powerful tools for colleges in their roles as employers, as educational institutions, and as community anchors, state leaders say. Utilizing the capacity of educational institutions, including community colleges, is part of the approach of working on long-term child care solutions that strengthen families and the state economy.

Samantha Cole, child care business liaison at the North Carolina Department of Commerce, said the task force has found that these efforts are working well for those participating, but are “hyper-localized” in funding source, design, and reach.

Cole said more peer-to-peer collaboration between colleges could help scale effective approaches to other communities.

“It’s not like you’re hearing that there’s a ton of external communication about the successes of these projects and programs,” Cole said at the December meeting of the task force. “We’d certainly like to see more of that. We think it might help encourage other campuses.”

Editor’s note: This article includes previous reporting by Mebane Rash, Katie Dukes, and Sophia Luna.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

When Dayanara Rivera drops off her 4-year-old daughter Keilanys at the center each morning, she doesn’t have to worry about traffic or rush back across town to make her classes. Instead, she walks a few hundred yards across the (STCC) campus, knowing that if she needs to check on her daughter, pick up materials from the library or meet with a professor during office hours, everything is within reach.

“I was ecstatic when I found out that they were literally right on campus,” said Rivera, a medical assistant working toward her nursing degree. It provided convenience, she said. “It just made it easier. … It made me come to school.”

undergraduate college students in the U.S. are raising children while enrolled, and about half of these student parents attend community and technical colleges, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

A lack of access to affordable child care, college costs, and challenges related to balancing work, school and raising a family, contribute to the fact that students with children are to leave college before graduating than students who aren’t parents.

The Head Start center at STCC addresses this need. The center educates 25 babies and toddlers while their parents attend school, and while it’s open to all families in the community, leaders expect that it will primarily serve children of STCC students over time as more of them learn about it. The program is part of a five-year project launched in 2024 by the and the . By increasing the number of Head Start child care programs on community college campuses, the project intends to remove child care barriers that too often derail student parents from achieving their educational goals. 

The project represents a strategic convergence of two urgent needs: expanding access to quality early childhood education for low-income families and supporting student parents whose educational aspirations are often .

The approach helps colleges gain capacity to support child care, which is a basic need for many students — and that boosts enrollment, persistence and completion. It offers families access to affordable high-quality, early learning opportunities for their children, and it gives future teachers at the colleges opportunities to get authentic classroom experience. 

Kids on Campus aims to establish at least 50 Head Start programs on community college campuses by 2030. The initiative’s shows concrete progress: Three programs are fully launched, with two more opening this fall. Furthermore, 87 community colleges and 98 Head Start programs have engaged with Kids on Campus, leading to 18 potential matches between interested partners. The initiative has also launched Kids on Campus —Texas as its first state-focused effort.

While the impact report acknowledges that “big initiatives take time to grow and blossom,” results from the first year suggest the model is gaining traction. Perhaps nowhere is the promise more evident than in Springfield, Massachusetts, where HCS Head Start and STCC are providing student parents with exactly the kind of integrated support system the national initiative envisions.

Making It Work in Western Massachusetts

HCS Head Start faced acute staffing shortages in the post-COVID landscape. Nicole Blais, CEO of HCS Head Start, which  operates 11 sites across the greater Springfield area and serves about 650 children from birth to age 5, was searching for solutions when she connected with STCC president John Cook.

The partnership that emerged goes far beyond colocation. Students in STCC’s early childhood education program can complete observations and student teaching requirements on-site. Students in the college’s health services program practice screenings and clinical skills with Head Start children. The model creates what Blais calls a comprehensive approach to “rebuilding the early child care workforce” while providing essential services to families and the broader campus community.

For HCS Head Start teacher Heidi Fogg, the campus location transforms what student parents can realistically accomplish. She sees how the opportunity plays out in daily schedules: “Some of our moms who are students at STCC aren’t full-time students,” she said, explaining that some take evening classes because they’re raising a family and working. But for those who take classes during the day, she said, “they are able to bring the kids to our center, and then they can go, whether it’s to the library, to make copies, to speak with their professor or for office hours.”

“They just have that luxury of not having to drive across town, bring the child to day care to come back,” Fogg added.

The convenience of on-site child care can help student parents persist and . The benefits of these programs also extend to the babies and toddlers who attend them. At home, Rivera watches her daughter enthusiastically share what she’s learning. “She likes to be the teacher. She likes to teach everybody at home what she learns,” Rivera said. “She says, ‘Okay dad, we’re going to learn about the spine of the book.’ So she literally pulled out one of her favorite books and started telling [her] dad, ‘This is the front, this is the spine. Repeat after me.’”

While it’s too early for comprehensive outcome data, the Springfield experience suggests the Kids on Campus model addresses several persistent challenges in higher education and early childhood development. By colocating services, the partnership reduces barriers for student parents while creating practical learning opportunities for future educators and health professionals.

For Rivera, the impact is clear: quality child care on campus means she can focus on her nursing program goals rather than logistics. “I don’t have to call the school if I have questions [and] wait for somebody to call me back. I can do it all in one go.”

As the Kids on Campus initiative works toward its goal of opening 50 campus-based Head Start programs, the Springfield model offers a template for how strategic partnerships can transform isolated challenges into integrated solutions. The promise lies not just in convenience, but in creating the conditions where student parents can succeed academically while their children receive quality early education.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Dayanara Rivera’s first name.

At a time when federal funding for Medicaid, public broadcasting and food assistance are on the chopping block, the fate of a smaller program has flown under the radar, despite having enormous implications for the population it serves. The (CCAMPIS) program provides a funding stream intended to help student parents complete their degrees by covering or decreasing the cost of child care. The Trump administration’s for fiscal year 2026, which was submitted to Congress in May, zeroing out funding for the small, yet popular program.

There are more than in the U.S., and roughly half of them have at least one child under the age of 6, according to New America. This population represents more than one in five American undergraduate college students. 

Unsurprisingly, access to affordable child care is a huge challenge for these individuals — and this obstacle is, in part, why student parents are to drop out of college than students without children. A 2022 report co-published by The Education Trust and Generation Hope, two nonprofits that focus on educational equity, “there is no state in which a student parent can work 10 hours a week at the minimum wage and afford both tuition and child care at a public college or university.” 

CCAMPIS, which launched in 1999 and has historically received bipartisan support, has been an important, if insufficient, finger in this dam. The funding, which as of 2025 is , helps around 3,000 students at more than 250 institutions of higher education (IHEs) complete their degrees and move toward a more stable life, according to the Congressional Research Service. And that’s to say nothing of the positive ripple effects for the broader community. 

The $75 million is distributed as grants to IHEs via an application process. The funding can be used to cover the cost of running (which can provide care for young children and offer before- or after-school care for older kids) or to subsidize the cost of off-campus child care for student parents through . 

The impacts can be life-changing. One student parent who was interviewed by researchers at New America , “as a military spouse with no nearby family or built-in support system, I often felt completely alone. This [CCAMPIS program] has changed that. It’s given me a network. Child care funding has given me the ability to care for myself and work toward a better future for my family, all while knowing my children are in safe, nurturing environments.”

In the context of the , the $75 million for CCAMPIS is small potatoes. It represents a tiny fraction of the nation’s annual spending. By comparison, the military parade that took place in Washington, D.C. on June 14, was estimated to cost . 

In a more ideal ecosystem of family policy and infrastructure, campus child care would be folded into a broad-based child care system and student parents would have more overall support, but in the absence of a more comprehensive system, CCAMPIS has become an important interim funding stream that, if anything, should be plussed up.

The rationale given in the budget request is wanting at best. The Trump administration “The Budget proposes to eliminate CCAMPIS because subsidizing child care for parents in college is unaffordable and duplicative. Funding can instead be secured through the Child Care [and] Development Block Grant. Further, IHEs could offer to accommodate this need among their student population, and many do.” Though the suggested is designated for helping low-income parents afford child care while they’re working or attending school, this funding is already stretched tissue-paper thin. It only reaches about and several states are under due to underfunding. And most IHE’s, especially community colleges, do not have the reserves to cover the gap.

In recent years, many colleges and universities due to fiscal challenges. One such casualty is the center at Everett Community College outside Seattle. The Seattle Times “anger, sadness, and frustration” among the student parents served by the closing center, adding that some parents relied on the center for much more than child care. The story highlighted one mother, Phala Richie: “she says she’s built meaningful relationships at the center, and there’s resources for parents. Sometimes, at the end of the year, she can’t afford to buy jackets for her kids, and the center helps families get winter clothes. The center’s pantry also helps when she’s running low on food or diapers. Richie has taken budgeting classes and learned how to do CPR.” 

It’s tempting to suggest that since CCAMPIS serves a relatively small population, it’s not such a big deal if it’s eliminated. But this proposal serves as an example of death by a thousand cuts. If the program disappears, it will represent the failure of an institution that everyday people have come to rely on. It will decrease trust in government, making it harder to pick up the pieces again and move toward a stronger, more solidaristic society where everyone can thrive. 

Hopefully, Congress will have enough sense to reject the Trump administration’s proposed cut to CCAMPIS funding and will instead seek out ways to bolster student parents rather than leaving them on an even more precarious ledge.