You are currently not logged in! Enter your authentication credentials below to log in. You need to have cookies enabled to log in.
Forgotten your password? Get a new one: Send new password
You can help our campaign gain recognition and increase its effectiveness in various ways! This page describes several things you can do to help.
Letters from concerned academic advisers, faculty, graduate colleagues, and undergraduate students are already central to raising awareness and engaging campus administration into action.
should be addressed to the following campus administrators:
This letter was originally sent to graduate student colleagues but can easily be modified for other audiences, such as professors or undergrads.
Dear Colleagues/Professors/Students,
Did you know that the cost of childcare at UC Berkeley, for many graduate student parents, is set to increase by more than 60% next year?
In response to a University wide 7-14% budget cut next year (coupled with ECEP's existing $400,000 budget deficit), the University's Early Childhood Education Program (ECEP) announced this dramatic fee increase on April 10th, 2008.
ECEP is levying this increase exclusively on “full fee” student parents—we are families who are living on GSI salaries, but are not “poor enough” to qualify for free or reduced-price, state subsidized care. Currently, we pay more for childcare than any other student population at Berkeley, but less than faculty and staff. Next year's 60% increase essentially eliminates the difference between student and faculty fees—beginning Fall 2008, many students will be expected to pay the same amount for childcare as do professors, administrators… even the Chancellor.
This increase, if enacted, will put many families at Berkeley—my family included—in a very difficult situation. I am faced with the very real possibility of having to leave our University without a degree because childcare at Berkeley is no longer affordable.
Several graduate student parents are organizing to fight this unfair fee increase, and the proposed budgetary cut to the ECEP. We believe that the Chancellor should:
We believe that the University should try to make its budget match its rhetoric. Amid campus wide discussions around equity, inclusion, and creating a family-friendly environment within the academy, programs that serve children and families are the last that should be cut. We're asking the Chancellor to freeze fees and maintain ECEP's current level of funding for at least one academic year, so that student parents and the program may work together to write grants, solicit donor dollars, and come up with other fiscal and political solutions to the program's budgetary problems. If no such solutions are available, families will have time in 2008-09 to find alternative child care arrangements; as this increase was announced on April 10, 2008 families were unable to find other childcare options for next year since most waiting lists have been closed since early this year.
Please consider writing a letter to Chancellor Birgeneau, Vice Chancellors Harry Le Grande and Gibor Basri, and Graduate Dean Andrew Szeri protesting this fee increase, and asking that they freeze student childcare fees, maintain ECEP's level of funding, and not force students like me out of the University. As graduate students, you might also let them know how this increase will affect your future at Berkeley—both personally and professionally.
If you'd like to write a letter of support, on behalf of me and other student parents, please email your letter, ASAP, directly to:
We are working to get a meeting with the Chancellor in May; please leave a hard copy of your letter in my box in ___, and I will personally deliver it to the Chancellor at that meeting.
Please let me know if I can count on your support.
Sincerely,
Your Name Here