Promising Partners: Community Colleges and Child Care Resource & Referral Networks

For the more than 1.5 million student parents at community colleges, finding quality child care can be an enormous challenge. Like many other workers and families, student parents struggle to find and afford child care. Most (74 percent) are juggling work in addition to school and parenting, creating intense demands on their time. Often, student parents need care during evenings and weekends, when many centers are closed, adding extra layers of difficulty.

Child care on college campuses can be part of the solution for student parents, and research shows student parents are retained and graduate at higher rates when they have access to on-campus care. But few community colleges can afford to fund on-campus child care at a level that meets the needs of all their student parents. In our research with a cohort of community colleges offering care on campus, an average of 60 or fewer spots for children were offered. Those spots can go to student parents, but they can also go to faculty, staff, and community members. At community colleges with thousands of students, that’s simply not enough to meet the needs of all of their student parents - around half of whom have children under 6.

While community colleges should do what they can to fund on-campus child care centers, many of their student parents will still need help finding care. A cost-effective way to help students not served by on-campus centers is connecting them with affordable options elsewhere in the community. However, developing this referral knowledge and reaching the students who need it takes time and staff capacity – which can be a challenge for under-resourced colleges.

Fortunately, organizations called Child Care Resource and Referral Networks (CCR&Rs) already have expertise in early education and an understanding of the local child care landscape. States are required to use a portion of their Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) allocations to support child care quality activities, which can include funding CC R&Rs. CCR&Rs are nonprofit or state-led organizations that offer services ranging from helping families locate child care that meets their needs to building the local supply of quality child care and growing the child care workforce. Specific services vary by state; almost 90 percent of CCR&Rs provide referral services to families while just under half conduct intakes for child care subsidies. More than 60 percent offer training and technical assistance around child care licensing, helping grow providers and child care spots in their region.

Some colleges have strong relationships with CCR&Rs. At Forsyth Tech Community College in North Carolina, college staff work closely with the Child Care Resource Center (the local CCR&R). The Child Care Resource Center serves nine counties across North Carolina, helping families locate quality child care and identify if they might be eligible for child care subsidies. Staff at the Child Care Resource Center also refer families to other resources they might need to thrive, such as utility and clothing assistance. In addition, the center provides technical assistance to child care providers to increase the local supply of quality child care.

The Child Care Resource Center and Forsyth Technical Community College are in touch regularly to make warm hand-offs, helping student parents take advantage of the center’s resources. The college sends over contact information for student parents (with the students’ permission), and the Child Care Resource Center calls them so they don’t slip through the cracks. Student parents then receive personalized support and information on a 24/7 online child care search tool offered through the Child Care Resource Center’s website.

In other cases, community colleges host the local CCR&R on campus. Linn-Benton Community College in Oregon operates Family Connections, the CCR&R for three local counties. Family Connections helps parents find child care and learn how to identify quality care that meets their needs. It also provides training and technical assistance to local child care providers to improve quality and increase child care supply.

Family Connections provides high-touch services to families in need of care in a rural child care desert. For Family Connections, their work is not just about pointing families to what’s available; it’s about helping them navigate complex choices, waitlists, subsidy eligibility, and transportation barriers in the region. Families need realistic child care solutions and with limited choices in hours, location, and cost, they often need support figuring out workable solutions.

The college community benefits from proximity and working relationships with Family Connections, which helps ensure students, faculty, and staff know the resources available. Meanwhile, because Family Connections is operated by the college, it benefits from the college’s infrastructure, including physical space and college staff like Human Resources and Information Technology. That allows Family Connections to focus on providing services to the local community, including student parents, faculty, and staff.

Community colleges interested in developing similar partnerships can start by contacting their local CCR&R to discuss collaboration. State agencies funding CCR&Rs have a role to play, too, by encouraging and facilitating partnerships between community colleges and CCR&Rs. States can coordinate to make sure community colleges are educated about CC R&Rs, and that CCR&Rs are educated about the needs of the local student parent population.

When there’s a need for physical space for a local CCR&R, states can reach out to community colleges about the possibility of hosting the CCR&R. This could take the form of college-operated CCR&Rs, but could also mean lending nonprofit-operated CCR&Rs space. A partnership with a college could allow CCR&Rs to cut costs and focus resources on their services, which is important given that many are already struggling for resources. It would also benefit colleges by helping facilitate closer partnerships with CCR&Rs that serve students, staff, and faculty, and support faculty and staff to better understand CC R&Rs as a resource to refer student parents to.

It’s easy to think of early childhood and higher education as discrete, unrelated systems. But higher education urgently needs ways to support student parents (and in many cases, their own workforce) in accessing child care, and CCR&Rs are the experts in understanding local child care challenges and options. States and higher education systems stand to benefit by creating intentional partnerships between colleges and CCR&Rs. Higher education institutions can support CCR&Rs by leveraging the college’s resources, even as they enhance child care quality and options for their students, faculty, and staff.