Education Dept. grant delays put students in a bind. This Gardner college has a workaround

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There are many differences between Carmina Garcia and Mahogany-Ann Fowler.
One attends a community college; the other goes to a regional university. Garcia lives in Arizona; Fowler is based in Pennsylvania. Garcia studies nursing; Fowler wants to be an architect.
But two key similarities have them in tough situations. Both are moms of young kids. And both are unsure what they'll do in the fall if a federal child care program they've come to rely on disappears about a month into the semester, as their colleges have warned.
On the heels of the U.S. Department of Education cutting its workforce in half in March, grant applications for at least a half-dozen federal programs for colleges have been delayed, according to experts. One of those affected is the Child Care Access Means Parents in School, or CCAMPIS, grant.
Read more: Education Dept. layoffs by the numbers: Which staff were ousted, where cuts hit hardest
For decades, the grant has helped parenting students at colleges across the country. Created by Congress in 1998, it awards money to higher education institutions to support or establish campus-based child care services. In addition to hiring staff to watch infants and toddlers, the grant also helps colleges develop before- and after-school programs for older kids while offering child care subsidies and advising.
In fiscal 2023, the grant provided more than $83 million to hundreds of colleges, federal data shows. The average award to each school was more than $317,000.
The need for such services is evident and ongoing: One in five undergraduate students has a child, according to government data, and research consistently shows that students with children are less likely than their non-parenting peers to complete their degrees on time – or at all.
Garcia, a 29-year-old with three kids between the ages of 1 and 4, said the child care program at Pima Community College allowed her to return to school.
"I don't know how I could've done it any other way," she said. "If I wouldn't have found this, I don't think that I would be pursuing the education that I'm pursuing."
Come Sept. 30, Pima's program will be gone. Phil Burdick, a spokesperson for the college, said the decision was made due to the Education Department's delays in releasing grant money.
The CCAMPIS funding at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where Fowler goes to school, is also set to end on that date. IUP spokesperson Michelle Fryling said the university is "unsure of any personnel changes related to the end of this grant."
That uncertainty is already causing parenting students to scramble. Unless something changes, Fowler and Garcia will lose their child care support just after the fall semester begins at their colleges.
Spokespeople for the Education Department did not respond to questions about the delay in the grant applications.
Experts puzzled over grant delays
Though the grant cycles for colleges' CCAMPIS programs differ, the funding at many schools will dry up in September. In the past, applications for those schools to renew their grants would have opened in late May and closed by July.
This year, the Education Department never opened those applications.
"We're still very much on the edge of our seats," said James Hermes, the associate vice president of government relations at the American Association of Community Colleges.
Exactly what's causing the delay is still puzzling students, colleges and experts. Some suspect the issue is staffing. President Donald Trump laid off hundreds of Education Department personnel in March and pushed hundreds more to retire or take buyouts.
Other onlookers, including Eddy Conroy, a senior policy manager on the higher education team at the left-leaning think tank New America, wonder whether the CCAMPIS program might be a casualty of the Trump administration's next effort to claw back funding already budgeted by Congress.
The president's budget proposal, released in May, suggested zeroing out funding for CCAMPIS altogether.
'States, localities, and colleges, not the federal government, are best suited to determine whether to support the activities authorized under this program," said the proposal, which Congress is considering ahead of a government shutdown deadline (which is also Sept. 30, the day the childcare grant money disappears).
But the White House has demonstrated an unusual comfort level with flouting the normal budgeting process. In July, the U.S. Senate rubber-stamped $9 billion in reductions to foreign aid and public broadcasting after Congress had already set aside money for those programs. Russell Vought, the head of the White House Office of Management and Budget, has indicated that education funding might be the next area of focus for Trump's cuts.
Read more: Senate approves cuts to public broadcasting, foreign aid
"Is this a capacity issue?" wondered Conroy of New America. "Or is this a backdoor way to illegally impound funds that have been appropriated?"
Hannah Fuller, a 22-year-old student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who's been a CCAMPIS recipient for three years, said her school is still figuring out how it'll handle the situation. She was told to start applying for state childcare support programs instead.
If she needs to look elsewhere for child care in the fall, she may have to find a second job on the weekends. (She's already a full-time paralegal and attends classes on the side.) But in that scenario, she doesn't know when she'd spend quality time with her 4-year-old son.
"He would never see me," she said.
One college turns to donors
While many schools are warning of cuts or sitting in limbo, one college in a small Massachusetts town has found a way to get ahead of the funding volatility.
When grant applications didn't open on their typical timeline, Ann Reynolds, the CCAMPIS adviser at Mount Wachusett Community College in Gardner, devised a Plan B. She went to the board members of the school's foundation and urged them to intervene.
She asked for $94,000 to cover two years, ensuring all of her enrolled CCAMPIS students would have support through graduation. The board said yes.
Still, Reynolds is "preparing for the best case scenario" (that the grant applications open soon).
"We may not get it," she said.
Alyson Koerts Meijer, a student at Mount Wachusett who relies on a day care program run by Reynolds, said she's seen how CCAMPIS has benefitted her classmates. Though she doesn't participate directly in the program herself, she's been advocating for it because she knows firsthand how hard it is to get a college education while raising a young child.
She wishes politicians could see that, too.
"They don't see the people," she said. "They just see the dollar signs."
Contributing: USA TODAY Graphics Editor Jim Sergent
Zachary Schermele is an education reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach him by email at [e-mail]. Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele and Bluesky at @zachschermele.bsky.social.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Mount Wachusett College in Gardner MA aims to help enrolled parents
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