Letter to the Hon. Roy Blunt, Sen. Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health, and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Chairman, and the Hon. Patty Murray, Ranking Member - Call For More Childcare Support For Student Parents

Letter

Dear Chairman Blunt and Ranking Member Murray:

Thank you for supporting the needs of student parents enrolled in higher education through your recent strengthening of the federal investment in the Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS) program. We applaud this increase as a critical first step toward putting college within reach for millions of students nationwide, more than one in four of which are raising a dependent child. As you work to draft the Fiscal Year 2019 appropriations bill, we request that you provide $67 million for the CCAMPIS program. The CCAMPIS program helps to meet the urgent needs of student parents working to attain a college degree or workforce training to provide economic security for themselves and for their children.

Approximately 1.4 million Pell Grant recipients today have children under the age of 5, and 4.8 million students in higher education have dependent children. Student parents struggle to pay for the ever-increasing price of child care services on top of tuition, fees, and other costs. Unfortunately, most students are not able to access existing child care programs, their options are often unaffordable, and child care centers located on campus are rare or have substantial wait lists. To help address these challenges, the CCAMPIS program supports campus-based child care programs primarily serving the needs of low-income students.

For fifteen years before the passage of the recent FY 2018 omnibus, funding for the CCAMPIS program did not increase and was only able to meet a tiny fraction of the student demand for affordable and high-quality on-campus child care. The recent agreement to raise overall spending caps provided an additional $2 billion in both FY 2018 and again in FY 2019 for "student-centered programs that aid college completion and affordability," which paved the way for the recent increase to the CCAMPIS funding level.

This new investment will provide a historic opportunity to address some of the vast unmet demand for on-campus child care from millions of students who are parents--but we can and must do more. Even under recent increased funding levels, campus child care wait lists will remain extraordinarily long and far too few students in need of affordable, high-quality child care will be able to access it. We therefore urge you to prioritize funding for the child care for student parents and use some of the funding provided by the $2 billion college affordability set-aside to increase the overall investment in CCAMPIS to $67 million as part of the FY 2019 appropriations measure.

Providing adequate child care resources to student parents will help to improve both college completion and affordability. Additionally, it will immediately address the vast unmet needs of millions of student parents focused on getting an education in order provide a better future for their families. Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,