











































0BSupporting Student Parents: Local Needs for Early Care and Education


Volume 2, Issue 1 
2018 

Allies for Education 2018, 1, 2 
https://journals.library.csuci.edu/ojs/index.php/afe 

 
Supporting Student Parents: Local Needs for Early 
Care and Education 

 
Adria Taha-Resnick 
Faculty, CSU Channel Islands  
Chair, Ventura County Planning Council 
 
Kaia Tollefson 
Professor of Education 
CSU Channel Islands 

Joan Karp 
Professor Emerita 
CSU Channel Islands 
 

Eight of nine student-parents interviewed at a local community college indicated that 
they planned to transfer to a four-year college after earning their associate's degree. All 
expressed interest in CSU Channel Islands, but most said it was not a possibility for them 
because of a lack of childcare services. Only one of the eight said she planned to attend 
CSU Channel Islands. When asked what she planned to do about childcare, she said she 
had no idea. (Karp, Lugo, Magaña, Nieves, Rodriguez & Veloz, 2012) 

For the past several years, we (three educator-scholars with over 100 years of teaching, research, and 
administrative experience spanning infancy through higher education) have been studying the impact of 
high quality, affordable early care and education with the goal of bringing an early childhood center to 
our campus. While our focus has been on the lack of affordable childcare services at CSU Channel Islands 
(CSUCI), the roots of the problem are much deeper, severely impacted by local, state, and federal 
policies and funding. The argument we will make in this paper is that the consequences emanating from 
this problem are so severe and so costly to individuals and to local, regional, and national economies, 
that its existence not only defies logic but flouts it.  

After examining resources allocated to affordable early care and education in Ventura County and at our 
university, we have identified three major needs, described below. We offer this detailed perspective on 
early care and education in our region with the assumption that this snapshot will resonate in other 
communities across the nation. 



Supporting Student Parents: Local Needs for Early Care and Education 
Adria Taha-Resnick, Kaia Tollefson, Joan Karp 

Allies for Education 2018, 2, 1 
https://journals.library.csuci.edu/ojs/index.php/afe 
 

Need 1: Early Care and Education Spaces for Young Children 
According to the 2015 report of the Local Planning Council of Ventura County, 49,464 children from 
birth to five years of age live in our county (2015). Over 23% of Ventura County’s children live in poverty, 
but this overall percentage obscures the fact that child poverty rates in California are much higher for 
children of color and for children of single-mother families than for white, Asian, and dual-parent 
families (Bohn, Danielson & Thorman, 2017).  

Over half of Ventura County’s young children from moderate and high-income families are in child care 
and education programs for part or all of each day, but far fewer children from the lowest income and 
ethnic minority families attend preschool programs. In 2014, 37,074 of our county’s children from birth 
to five years of age were eligible for government subsidized child care, but of these, a mere 14% actually 
received services (Local Planning Council of Ventura County, 2015). In that same year, there were 8,904 
children from birth to five living in poverty in Ventura County, but only 1,246 of them (again, only 14%) 
were served by government subsidized programs (2015). 

A sizeable number of eligible children in California are missing out on the opportunity for early 
education. Figure 1 shows how many eligible children in California are not being served in early 
childhood programs. It is striking to note that there are twice as many infants and toddlers compared to 
preschool children who are eligible and not served. 

Figure 1 
 

(Melnick, Meloy, Gardner, Wechsler, & Maier, 2018, p. 26) 
 

This educational under-serving of Ventura County’s poorest and youngest children is extraordinarily 
significant. So much is at stake for the rest of their lives, to them and to our society, consequent to what 
they learn and experience in their first five years. Most of what they will learn throughout their lives is 
rooted in the earliest years (see Figure 2), given that 85% of the core structures in children’s brains are 
already developed by the time most of them enter kindergarten at age five (National Research Council 
and Institute of Medicine, 2000). 

  



Supporting Student Parents: Local Needs for Early Care and Education 
Adria Taha-Resnick, Kaia Tollefson, Joan Karp 

Allies for Education 2018, 2, 1 
https://journals.library.csuci.edu/ojs/index.php/afe 
 

Figure 2 
 

(Nelson, cited in Center on the Developing Child, 2007, #1) 

Lack of early access to high quality care and education for our poorest children is one of the 
fundamental cracks in their lives that will widen, year by year, to become the achievement gap. By age 
three, children from middle and upper income families have vocabularies that are 66% larger than those 
from poor families (Hart & Risley, 1995). Gross disparities in early literacies foreshadow the gaps we see 
in academic achievement and degree attainment patterns of later years 

The cost of child care as a percentage of family income is enormous for low income families, as can be 
seen in Figure 3. For example, for a couple with one child and an income at 100% of the poverty level in 
Ventura County, child care costs consume 52.3% of their income. A same-sized family having twice the 
income spends 26.1% on child care 

Figure 3  
 

(2017 State of the Region Download, 2017, p. 37) 



Supporting Student Parents: Local Needs for Early Care and Education 
Adria Taha-Resnick, Kaia Tollefson, Joan Karp 

Allies for Education 2018, 2, 1 
https://journals.library.csuci.edu/ojs/index.php/afe 
 

Since 2010, California has cut early learning programs’ budgets by $1,000,000,000, despite what is 
known about the importance of early care and education. These cuts have resulted in 110,000 lost 
spaces in early care and education programs for children in the state, 4,000 of which were lost in 
Ventura County. 2014-2015 saw the first budget increase to early learning programs in California in 10 
years, with an increase of $260,000,000 representing only one-fourth of the funding lost since 2010 
(Local Planning Council of Ventura County, 2018). First 5 Ventura County (2013) identifies lack of 
facilities first on a list of barriers to Pre-K expansion in the region. 

Need 2: Access to Postsecondary Education for Student Parents 
Early care and education for college-going student-parents is difficult to find and expensive. Additional 
challenges for student-parents are finding options for care that match college schedules and gaining 
access to programs where state subsidies are available (Gault, Reichlin, Reynolds & Froehner, 2014). 
Most centers operate on a typical 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. schedule, which fails to serve the needs of working 
parents whose college courses are often taken during late afternoon and evening hours.  

An early care and education center on our campus would allow our university, the only public four-year 
university in Ventura County, to better serve a population that is now substantially underserved. In 
2015, our best efforts to ascertain the number of student-parents attending CSUCI (in the absence of an 
established mechanism for identifying them) resulted in an estimate of 300, or five percent of the 
campus’s student population at that time. This is one-third of the national average of student parents 
attending a four-year university (Gault et al., 2014). Hundreds of missing student parents at CSU Channel 
Islands is a significant reality to consider, particularly given the likelihood that they are parents with very 
low incomes for whom access to education would make a significant difference in their own lives, and in 
the lives of their children. Indeed, 48% of students participating in a family services needs assessment 
conducted at our university indicated that their income was at or below the federal poverty level (Karp 
et al., 2012).  

Nationwide, women of color in postsecondary education are more likely than other college students to 
have dependent children. Of these females in college, 47% of African Americans, 39.4% of Native 
Americans, and 31.6% of Latinas are mothers. Further, student parents of color have lower incomes 
than white student parents. Nearly 71% of black student parents and 68% of Hispanic student parents 
live at or below 200 percent of the poverty level, compared with 49% of white student parents (Gault, 
Reichlin & Roman, 2014). 

As stated earlier, for those in the lowest income levels, access to education can change not only their life 
circumstances but also those of the future generations of their families. However, we must remember 
that a university’s responsibilities to its student parents extend beyond the question of entry-level 
access. Of those individuals who do make it to college, completion is less likely than for non-parents. As 
Nelson, Froehner & Gault (2013) found, “Being a parent substantially increases the likelihood of leaving 
college with no degree, with 53% of parents vs. 31% of non-parents having left with no degree after six 
years” (p. 1). University leaders must recognize that student parents are a unique population whose 
challenges are significant and in addition to those commonly experienced by students without children. 
Support services for this population makes a difference. Findings from a study at Monroe Community 
College (MCC) in New York State point to the positive impact of campus-provided child care for student 
parents (cited in Noll, Reichlin, & Gault, 2017):   

http://www.first5ventura.org/


Supporting Student Parents: Local Needs for Early Care and Education 
Adria Taha-Resnick, Kaia Tollefson, Joan Karp 

Allies for Education 2018, 2, 1 
https://journals.library.csuci.edu/ojs/index.php/afe 
 

MCC students with children under the age of six who used the campus child care center were 
more likely to return to school the following year than their counterparts who did not use the 
child care center (68 percent, compared with 51 percent). Parents who used child care were also 
nearly three times more likely to graduate or go on to pursue a B.A. within 3 years of enrollment 
(41 percent, compared with only 15 percent). (p. 13)  

Need 3: Strengthen Academic Programs and Professional Development 
for the ECE Workforce  
Laboratory learning opportunities in early childhood education are as essential to students in education 
as science labs are to students in STEM disciplines. However, despite having an Early Childhood Studies 
major with over 400 students enrolled, CSU Channel Islands does not have an early care and education 
center. Student observers and student teachers are placed throughout the county in a variety of centers. 
Finding a sufficient number of field sites for these students is a continuing challenge for us, as it typically 
is for early childhood programs across the nation (NAEYC, 2012).  

In addition to providing more student teaching placements for Early Childhood Studies, an on-campus 
children’s center would provide meaningful instructional opportunities for students in many disciplines 
(e.g., education, nursing, psychology, sociology, visual and performing arts) that are not possible in a 
university classroom. A learning lab of this kind creates opportunities for students in these many fields 
to:  

• integrate theory, research, and practice while learning and practicing the latest developments in 
the field; 

• develop skills in observation, assessment, teaching and research, which is a particularly relevant 
problem given that students who have had the opportunity to have clinically-based preparation 
are more successful teachers (NAEYC, 2012); and 

• learn and practice collaboration skills with the center’s administrators, teachers, and parents. 

Early care and education centers on college campuses serve significant needs at multiple levels—serving 
young children, student parents, college faculty and students in many disciplines, and practitioners in 
the early childhood workforce.  

Conclusion 
These three major needs are interconnected—lack of spaces for early education and care, lack of 
funding, and lack of facilities to prepare early childhood educators. Together, they demonstrate a failure 
of our collective responsibility to the youngest, most vulnerable members of our society, despite heroic 
efforts by professionals in the field to do their essential work with inadequate public support and 
resources. This failure must be corrected and can be, through purposeful coalition building, creative 
thinking about needs, resources, and systems, and intentional, collaborative actions across institutions 
and organizations in our region.  

CSU Channel Islands is doing incredibly important work in our region and is recognized as being the 18th 
most effective university in the nation for improving social mobility of low income students (CSU 
Channel Islands News Center, 2017). Extending this work to incorporate the needs of student parents is 
a logical and necessary next step. 



Supporting Student Parents: Local Needs for Early Care and Education 
Adria Taha-Resnick, Kaia Tollefson, Joan Karp 

Allies for Education 2018, 2, 1 
https://journals.library.csuci.edu/ojs/index.php/afe 
 

About the Authors 
Adria Taha-Resnick is faculty at California State University, Channel Islands. She has 25 years of 
experience in early care and education working as a teacher, administrator, and trainer and currently 
teaches future teachers. In addition to teaching, Adria is the Vice President for the California Association 
for the Education of Young Children, and Chair of the Ventura County Local Planning Council. Her 
interests include quality initiatives and building leadership in early care and education.  

Kaia Tollefson, Ph.D., is a Professor of Education at California State University, Channel Islands. Dr. 
Tollefson has 35 years of experience as an educator and administrator at P-12, undergraduate, and 
graduate levels of schooling. She has authored a number of articles and two books, Cultivating the 
Learner-Centered Classroom and Volatile Knowing: Parents, Teachers, and the Censored Story of 
Accountability in America's Public Schools, all of which seek to promote educational equity and 
excellence of opportunity for all students. Current research interests include social justice in education, 
leadership, and Critical Friends Groups as a professional development approach for faculty, staff, and 
administrators in higher education. 

Joan M. Karp, Ph.D., is Professor Emerita at California State University, Channel Islands. After completing 
over 40 years as a teacher and professor of special education, Dr. Karp concluded her work at California 
State University, Channel Islands as Director of the School of Education. Prior to her work at CSUCI, she 
was a teacher, researcher, and grant director at University of Minnesota Duluth, University of 
Washington, University of California Santa Barbara and Rhode Island College. Her research examined 
ways to prepare interdisciplinary educators and educators with disabilities for a variety of leadership 
roles in education. In addition, she studied organizational change and the integration of young children 
with disabilities into general education. 

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Supporting Student Parents: Local Needs for Early Care and Education 
Adria Taha-Resnick, Kaia Tollefson, Joan Karp 

Allies for Education 2018, 2, 1 
https://journals.library.csuci.edu/ojs/index.php/afe 
 

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	Supporting Student Parents: Local Needs for Early Care and Education
	About the Authors
	References

