After decades of advocacy from faculty and staff — ranging from committee discussions to thoroughly researched presentations — Wake Forest plans to establish a child care and early education center, with faculty, staff and students receiving priority enrollment.

According to a Oct. 27 university news release, the Board of Trustees approved a resolution to renovate space in the University Corporate Center (UCC) — located near campus on Reynolds Boulevard — to house the center. The release announced that, with renovations beginning in January, Wake Forest will continue to finalize vendor contracts and a child care and early education service provider in upcoming months. 

The center will address the concerns of Wake Forest community members who must balance work or school with familial responsibilities. This obligation, which according to the Pew Research Center usually falls on women, has been made more difficult due to a lack of child care options in the area. 

Faculty have long advocated for university-sponsored childcare options for at least the past 32 years, according to Dr. Simone Caron, a Wake Forest history professor who has served on Wake Forest’s Child Care Advisory Committee (CCAC) since 2017. The CCAC convenes faculty and staff who aim to understand and address specific child care issues within the Wake Forest community. 

“We were trying everything to build more support and more advocacy,” Caron said. “We were actually in the community putting things together, getting data, putting PowerPoints together, presenting all of this, looking at who provides daycare.”

The Faculty Senate also helped to bring the center to fruition. 

“Many before me have advocated and worked with the administration and the Board of Trustees to get us to this point,” Dr. Arjun Chatterjee, president of the Faculty Senate, told the Old Gold & Black. “Projects like this require commitment from the faculty, staff, administration, and Board of Trustees. Moving a large and complex bureaucracy forward is never easy, but in this case, it is absolutely worth the effort.”

For professors with children, the center will help address the critical lack of childcare options in Winston-Salem.  

“Child care has hit an urgent point in the entire community,” said Dr. Amanda Gengler, an associate professor of sociology who teaches classes on care work and is the mother of a six-year-old. “So finding child care at all is just extraordinarily challenging.”

When parents seek out child care services in Winston-Salem, they are often met with miles-long waiting lists.

“When I found out I was pregnant, I got on a bunch of waiting lists of, like, 10 day cares across Winston,” said Dr. Andrea Gómez-Cervantes, assistant professor of sociology. “I just received a phone call maybe about a month ago, asking if I still wanted to be [on] the waiting list — and my son is almost going to be two.”

When parents are unable to access child care, they frequently find themselves facing the difficult question of whether they will be able to return to work. Data shows this dilemma is inherently gendered and often does not equally affect mothers and fathers.

According to a USAFacts analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data, among employed parents, mothers are more than four times as likely to miss work than fathers due to child care commitments.

The new child care center aims to help relieve this burden, providing working mothers with necessary child care support.

“Child care responsibilities continue to disproportionately fall on women,” Caron, the history professor on Wake Forest’s Child Care Advisory Committee, said. “So if you’re the mother, you’re the one who’s probably out there trying to find [child care]…and doing the drop off and pickups.”

Throughout their 32 years at Wake Forest, Caron has been a relentless voice in the fight for accessible child care at Wake Forest. 

“I think that’s where my role came in as being a consistent bulldog,” Caron said. “…It was putting a plan together…It was looking at what kinds of options are available in our community. We actually put data together — how many centers are there? What ages are they serving? Where are they geographically located? Where are the deserts — where [is] there no child care?”

Several faculty members have pointed to the recent increase in female leadership at Wake Forest as an explanation for why these changes are finally taking place after 40 years of advocacy and discussion. For the first time in Wake Forest history, women occupy many of the top positions, including that of the President, Provost, Dean of the College and Chief Financial Officer. 

“I think that right now we have leadership who directly know what it’s like to navigate careers in academia with kids, as mothers,” said Director of the Women’s Center Shell Sizemore. “I think that it makes a difference just because we know that a lot of times, leaders are imagining what needs to happen…based off of their own experiences and what they’ve seen.”

According to Caron, in addition to clearing a path for parents to equally participate in the workforce, accessible child care will lead to better retention of faculty and staff at Wake FOrest as potential hires have been dissuaded by a lack of child care options in the past.

“We’ve been competing against universities who all have child care,” Caron said, “If you’re trying to attract the best and the brightest faculty to come here, and they have three options of other places they can go to…people would say, ‘What do you mean you don’t have child care?’”

Some of the roadblocks that advocates for child care solutions at Wake Forest have encountered include economic struggles and, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, pushing the issue of child care to the backburner. 

“It has been a long fight,” Caron said. “We had gotten close a couple of times, and then at the last minute, it just disappeared for a number of reasons.”

However, with the success of this initiative and the planned establishment of the child care and early education center, faculty are optimistic about the future of female advocacy at the university.

“Hopefully, as women, as we continue to encounter problems and as we make our way into all other professions, if we see those barriers, if we can crack the door open, hopefully, we can work to open the door all the way,” Caron said.

Correction and Update Nov. 10: The subheadline of this article has been changed to better reflect the amount of time members of the university community have advocated for childcare options.