Issue of the Hour: Nov. 19, 2025

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

This post will be relatively short because I am pressed for time and life is becoming increasingly hectic due to approaching finals. Also I apologize for posting a day late, yesterday was particularly hectic.

Today’s Topics: Bursar News Update, Update on Childcare Project and WCSA’s First Official Meeting

An Update on the Bursar Situation- Bursar Limit will Lower to $0

Last post I said that the bursar limit was being lowered from $2000 to $1000, meaning if you’re more than $1000 in debt, you can’t register for classes.

I recently learned that they’re now setting the bar even lower to a $0 bursar limit. The school is doing this because they are in lots of debt. 

Previously I wrote that the administration told staff and faculty not to put this into writing. Yesterday I learned that they’d also barred the preface from writing about it too. However, the preface pushed back and were eventually allowed to cover the topic. 

Working Class Students of America will Potentially Partner with Student Social Worker Association in the Future

As for the childcare issue, we have not yet made any tangible progress toward reopening a center or getting a childcare program started on campus. I have gone to the social work department to look for resources I could share with the WCSA at our meeting today, but as of now I have not gotten any new information. 

However, the social work department has showed a lot of enthusiasm for what the union is doing and are eager to partner with us. I am hopeful that together we will be able to see more progress, more quickly. I have yet to reach out to the Student Social Worker Association directly to ask about a partnership, but will do so as soon as I can.

Working Class Students of America’s First Official Meeting 

Yesterday on the 20th of November, Working Class Students of America held our first official meeting!

 We discussed our goals and some of the projects we are working on. We talked a little bit about some of the mutual aid projects we are working on, including a carpooling system, a free library of used textbooks and a potential childcare program. 

We also discussed holding meetings for intellectual discourse and pushing as a group for more transparency from the administration in regards to policy and financial concerns— as IU has been particularly secretive about very important decisions that can and will affect the lives of hundreds if not thousands of students in very significant ways.

A writer for The Preface at IUSB— Wren Betts, came to our meeting. They will be writing an article about the WCSA in the preface shortly.

The meeting was a relatively small one, but I am optimistic about the future of our student organization. Not only will we have our names in the papers, but now we are finally starting to formulate a specific agenda for what we plan to do and delegating tasks among our members and officers. 

If anyone has any issues that they would like me to write about, please let me know in the comments below.

SEO terms- IU South Bend, Working Class Students of America, Preface, Bursar Limit

Issue of the Hour- Nov 6, 2025

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

My first one can be found here.

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 topics: Concerning bursar news, updates on the Childcare Center project and the WCSA student club/union  

Concerning Bursar News: IU has changed the bursar limit without notifying students 

Protest sign from almost two decades ago— when will they listen?

Image Credit: Manfred Werner

One of my acquaintances posted to discord 3 days ago informing members of their group that IU has changed the bursar limit (previously $2000) to $1000 without notifying students, and according to the person who I got the information from, IU told staff and faculty not to put this information into writing.

This means that if your bursar bill is over $1000, you cannot register for new classes. In my acquaintance’s words, “This could prevent students graduating on time, affect financial aid and potentially even influence students to drop out if they can’t get their bill down fast enough”. My acquaintance told the people in their server to tell as many people as they can, because students deserve to be informed. 

When I asked for the source of the information, my acquaintance responded that they couldn’t give a source because staff are not allowed to inform students about this unless specifically asked and my acquaintance doesn’t want to jeopardize the person who told them. They then directed me to the Titan Success Center for any questions or concerns. 

I haven’t done any further research as of the moment, but this is pretty alarming. I wish that I could write more extensively about this issue, but this is something I only found out about a couple of days ago. I will update this blog as soon as I have more information.

Updates on the Childcare Center Project

In my last post, I detailed my findings on the old child development center that once ran on campus for student/faculty parents and parents in the local community to place their children in good hands while they worked. I also wrote about potential plans to get the childcare center up and running again.

Since I wrote my last entry, I have spoken with Susan Cress, a retired IU South Bend professor of early childhood education who was very active and involved with the child development center at IUSB for 25 years. The information on the linked page may be slightly outdated, as she retired a few years ago.

During our meeting she told me that the business plan that was written up to re-open the childcare center was written while the school still had the proper infrastructure in place to run the center, but it has since been torn down in order to move the bookstore there. 

She also stated that right now, St. Joseph County, due to recent funding cuts from the federal and state government, is very low on voucher money for childcare— and while most student parents at IUSB would be eligible for them, the waiting lists are extensive. 

She said that it would be logistically very difficult and very expensive to re-open the old childcare center, and that, realistically, re-opening it in the near future is an improbability. 

However, she said that there are other ways to  help students with childcare that we as a student body can most certainly utilize right now. She recommended finding a list of all available childcare services and nonprofits in the area and making the list publicly accessible to all IU students. She said that contacting to the social work group at IUSB would be a good way to find resources, and I plan to do so in the near future.

She also recommended parent-to-parent trade offs and friendships and on-the-spot babysitting— something that would require a lot of organizing, but would ultimately be easier than starting the 

childcare center up again in the short term. I think that the WCSA may provide a good avenue for that.

Re-starting the childcare center is not entirely out of the question yet, though: a blue wave has swept the nation, proving that democracy is still working and the tides are shifting. I believe that once Indiana University gets back up on its feet after this whole fiasco dies down, we may have a second chance. In the meantime, we must utilize the avenues available to us.

Our Student Union at IUSB is now official— we have a Titan Atlas page and a Discord!

The Working Class Students of America has a discord and a titan atlas page as of now. We are excited to be an official club, and are in the process of planning our first official meeting.

Here is our discord and here is our titan atlas page.  

SEO terms: IUSB, Bursar, Child Development Center, Childcare