Motions Passed
1.
RESOLUTION TO PROTECT ON-CAMPUS CHILD CARE PROVIDED BY THE
CHILDREN'S CENTER
PREAMBLE
The University of Maine Children's Center
provides high-quality child care for
the campus community, including faculty, staff, graduate students,
and undergraduates. The University provides $243,165 of the Center's
total $718,094 (2001--2002) budget, or 33.9%, with the rest coming
from fees paid by parents (33.6%), government subsidies for
low-income parents (26.7%), the USDA Food Program (4.1%), the
Department of Human Services funds for quality
improvement (1.6%), and
miscellaneous other sources (0.1%).
The recent round of budget cuts proposed by
the Administration includes a 50%
cut in the University's funding for the Children's Center, or 17% of
the Center's total budget. This cut is much higher than the average
cut to the University's funding of other programs on campus, which
seem generally to be in the 2--5% range. Indeed, the Interim Chief
Financial Officer recently publicly stated that he was unaware of
any other program on campus whose
budget the Administration proposes to cut to
this extent.
The proposed cut puts the Children's Center
at risk of closing, even allowing
for increased fees charged to the parents. Closing or reducing the
quality of the Children's Center obviously directly affects the
children and parents who are associated with the Center. However,
the Children's Center serves more than just those stakeholders. Much
as the fire department serves the needs of more of the community
than just those who require its services, so the Children's Center
serves the entire campus community. Its existence serves those who
might have children in the future. It serves those departments that
have faculty, staff, graduate students, or undergraduates with
children in the Center, since it frees those individuals from worry
that impacts their performance and from lost time that they might
otherwise have. It allows professors to teach classes in the summer
and to meet with their graduate and undergraduate students then. It
allows those researchers with children to spend their productive
summer time working instead of needing to be home. Consequently,
since much of the grant writing done on campus takes place during
summer or is supported by research that occurs then, the Children's
Center significantly contributes to the University's ability to
generate external funding and high-quality research. Indeed, it is
unclear if the supposed savings obtained by cutting the Center's
budget outweigh the loss of indirect cost money from grants that
would be lost as researchers are forced to give up grant writing in
the summer. The Center is also a powerful recruiting and retention
tool for the campus, both for faculty and staff and
for students.
In addition, child care is widely seen,
rightly or wrongly, as a women's
issue. The presence or absence of high-quality, affordable child
care on campus says a lot about the friendliness of the University
and administration to families and women. It is extremely
ill-advised from the standpoint of public opinion for the University
to cut child care, especially at a time when the University needs
the good will of the citizens of Maine to weather bad
economic times.
MOTION
Whereas the
proposed cut to the University's contribution to the budget of the
Children's Center is disproportionately larger than the cuts
proposed for other programs on campus; and
whereas
the proposed cut will harm and potentially eliminate the Children's
Center; and
whereas harming
the Children's Center directly harms those members of the
University community with
children in the Center; and
whereas harming
the Children's Center indirectly harms the University's core
teaching and research
missions; and
whereas harming
the Children's Center indirectly harms the University's
ability to generate
external grant funding; and
whereas harming
the Children's Center contributes to a chilly climate for
women and young families
on campus; and
whereas harming
the Children's Center will signal to the citizens of Maine
that the University is indifferent to the needs of women and
families in the campus
community:
Be it resolved that the Faculty Senate of
the University of Maine strongly
disapproves of the amount of the proposed cuts to the Children's
Center budget and hereby urges the Administration to do all in its
power to ensure that any reduction in the University's contribution
to the Center's budget be no more than the average reduction, on a
percent basis, to the University's
contribution to other programs on campus.
Return to
Motions Passed
