Issue of the Hour– Oct 23, 2025

Hello and welcome to my first bi-weekly blog post, Issue of the Hour. 

This will be my main repeating blog entry and the purpose of this bi-weekly post will be to cover my findings about issues at IU South Bend concerning student life, student needs and ways in which students and faculty on campus are trying to address those needs (or alternatively, ignoring them). At the end I will write about ways in which readers can get involved and support students at our school.

Since this blog is just getting started, Issue of the Hour will most likely cover everything I am working on at the moment, but as the blog grows I will likely branch out and create more specific weekly, bi-weekly entries dedicated to different issues or aspects of school life. I may also change its name from Issue of the Hour to something else, as I’m not quite satisfied with the name I’ve come up with.

If anyone has any concerns or needs that they think I should look into and write about, please feel free to leave suggestions in the comment section. 

Today’s topic: Student Parents at IU South Bend and the now dissolved Child Development Center that ran on campus for over twenty years— and plans to bring childcare back to our school

         An adult and two children holding hands (rawpixel)

A few weeks ago I interviewed professor April Lidinsky about the Child Development Center at IUSB— something I hadn’t known existed in my four years of education here until I heard about it from my writing professor while brainstorming ideas for an e-news article. I recommend reading the article along with this post if you are interested to know more about the story.

This childcare center:

• Was started by students in the early 1980s

• Ran for several decades, enrolling dozens of children each semester 

• Provided high-quality childcare and employee benefits 

• was widely supported by students on campus

• Was hired out to a private company in 2014 due to a lack of funding from the SGA (which it had been gradually losing for about a decade)

• shut its doors in 2017 because the company that  owned it was not paying rent, and because the chancellor felt that “as a public university it was improper for us to essentially subsidize a for-profit operation”.

I wrote more about it in my news article, but this is a basic run-down of the child development center’s history. 

Prof. Lidinsky told me that there was a group of students and faculty that had written up a business plan to re-open the center and proposed it to the new chancellor Susan Elrod around the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, but, as one can imagine, partially due to the timing, it didn’t work out.

Last week I interviewed Prof. Monica Lynker, who transferred to IU South Bend in the 1990s because of the university’s high-quality, subsidized  childcare center, which helped care for her young children while she was teaching. 

She said that she would not have come to teach at IUSB had it not been for the childcare center and, though her children were grown by the time it closed down, she was deeply saddened by its closure. She told me that nearly every semester she has several students who are parents and either miss class or face challenges in school because childcare is so demanding. 

She was also the one who told me that a few years before it was shut down, the center was hired out by a private company, Childcare of Michiana LLC. 

The words “private company” made a million little alarm bells start ringing in my head, so naturally I was very curious about that. I did a little bit of digging into that statement and found that the reason for the privatization was largely a lack of funding from the school and from the SGA… but also due to pressure from IU central.

Prof. Lidinsky told me that there were new policies from IU central at the time that demanded more of the school building be dedicated to generating a profit for the school. Sadly, childcare does not generate a profit in this country. 

Privatizing childcare at IUSB, unsurprisingly, did not make things better, and the center only survived about three more years afterward. 

Though lack of funding is a serious problem, this does not justify leaving student parents without childcare at IUSB. This is a community college, and most of the students are local. That means there will be more student parents enrolled in our school, and affordable childcare is an essential service for parents who want to succeed… and secure better futures for their children. 

I highly recommend reading the blog for Imaginable Futures to learn more about the positive impacts of campus childcare on working-class families. 

I do think that the school’s current situation  will make it more difficult to re-introduce a childcare center on campus, but I don’t think it’s impossible. 

Prof. Lidinsky says that a university poll from a few years ago showed that a majority of students would support a childcare center on campus— but there are currently no organized efforts within the student body that are working to bring back the childcare center.

If there is an organized campaign among the student body, paired with a business plan (Lidinsky says that the business plan may need a little bit of reworking because some time has passed since it was originally drafted), we may be able to see  progress made on this issue.

This brings me to the next section of my blog post:

Our Student Union at IUSB is now becoming official

Clenched fist— a symbol of unity and resistance (freesgv.org)

Right now, the student union I mentioned in my first post on this blog has a name (Working Class Students of America), has a constitution, four official members including a president, co-president and treasurer, an advisor and and several others who have expressed interest in our group. We’re in the process of getting our page set up on Titan Atlas right now.

We have decided that the first major issue we want to focus on as a student union is campaigning and organizing to get a childcare center up and running again on campus. If you are interested in joining us or want to receive emails from us in the future, feel free to reach out to me at sydsmous@iu.edu.

In the future I may make this section of the blog post into its own separate weekly or biweekly post, as right now our union is just getting started and we have a lot of growing to do but as we grow there will be more to write about.

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