U. increases parents' perks

Graduate students with families will soon benefit from significant changes to University policy, including expanded childcare subsidies, extended maternity leave and suspended teaching and academic obligations during time off.

"Princeton is making a fantastic effort to help graduate students," said Emily Frasier, a pregnant mother of two whose husband is a second-year graduate student. "I think they are understanding that it's extremely hard to raise a family on $20,000 [a year]."

The newly implemented initiatives will allow for three months of maternity leave accompanied by the extension of academic deadlines, money for childcare that can be used anywhere instead of only at University-affiliated facilities, childcare during emergencies and work-related travel, a mortgage program and counseling services.

Most of the initiatives were recommended by the Child Care Working Group, a seven-person group that is part of the President's Task Force on Health and Well-Being and chaired by psychology professor Joan Girgus.

"The focus is on providing the support that graduate students need to balance work and family life, where we haven't really had many support systems for graduate students in the past," Girgus said of the initiatives.

In its 2004 interim report, the president's task force noted, "there seem to be a number of University policies and practices that were initially designed to discourage graduate students with children from applying to Princeton or to discourage graduate students at Princeton from having children."

Aaron Schurger GS, who began a petition two months ago protesting the University's stipulation that both parents need to be working in order to receive childcare grants, said the initiatives were positive steps but that there was more work to be done. Specifically, he said, the new childcare grants, though "portable," actually represented a drop in funding.

"With the existing program, grad students that I know who have their kids at U-Now [a University-affiliated daycare facility] pay in the neighborhood of $350 a month ... and U-Now costs about $1,500 a month. So if you take that subsidy out to a year, that's about a $12,000 subsidy. With the new program, the subsidy would be $5,000."

Frasier said she was not completely satisfied with the new initiative. Her son can only attend nursery school because his grandparents pay for it. She also said that a family friend and fellow graduate student is considering moving to another country and working from home in order to get cheaper childcare.

"I just wish that they would take a closer look at some things and say, maybe this needs to change," she said.

Girgus said that the working group would now turn its attention to, among other things, lobbying for a on-campus childcare center that can accommodate more children. The University-sponsored U-Now daycare is nearly always full, and several mothers interviewed for this article agreed that more childcare centers were urgently needed.

"We very much need to build a new childcare center that will accommodate the needs of our graduate students, faculty and staff, and that has a large number of infant and toddler spaces in particular," Girgus said.