Parenting Students Take D.C.
For the third year in a row, we celebrated the nation’s parenting students in September 2023 during the annual celebration of National Student Parent Month. This is a time to elevate the stories and experiences of parenting students navigating the complexities of higher education and parenting. And this year we did more. For the first time since National Student Parent Month began, we brought in three student parents from around the country to meet with congressional offices and participate in a Congressional Roundtable.
When planning this year’s National Student Parent Month, our team discussed ways we could make the most significant impact in elevating the voices and experiences of parenting students. The annual resolution passed by the Senate is an important and official way to acknowledge parenting students, but we wanted to find a way to make an even bigger impact. Cue Student Parent Hill Day, when we flew parenting students to DC to share their stories with congressional offices.
After spending the entire day on Monday navigating both joys and challenges connected to travel, Dominique, Cordero, and Kimberly met me earlier Tuesday morning. They were nervous, excited, and ready to go.
Given the time poverty student parents already face, our day on the Hill needed to be short and packed to get them back to their children that night. We first met with the House Education and Workforce Committee Chair Rep. Foxx’s team, and immediately returned to the Senate side to prepare and host the roundtable. Immediately following, and with a tight time crunch in rainy weather, we jumped into a cab to head back to the House side and met with Ranking Member Scott’s team. After a quick lunch, we said goodbye to Cordero, who had a flight to catch and headed back to the Senate for meetings with Chair Sanders’ and Ranking Member Cassidy’s teams. Dominique and Kimberly headed to the airport to grab their flights home.
Throughout the day, the students shared stories of resilience and overcoming hurdle after hurdle to make a better life for themselves and their families. Cordero started his pursuit of higher education while serving 10 years in prison. With four kids, one with special needs, he knew he needed and wanted to provide a better life with different opportunities for his children, and higher education was the critical component. Kimberly started college as a traditional student only to have to withdraw so she could work a full-time job to support her parents, eventually going back to community college, then pregnancy, and welcoming her daughter right before finals. She transferred to UC Berkeley where she will be graduating in December with a 4.0 GPA. Dominique was a young mom who thought higher education was not for her until she found herself single with two young boys. She moved to a new state and lived in a homeless shelter while navigating a medical coding certificate program. When she finished that program, she was inspired to keep going and is now working toward her associate degree in childhood education.
Kimberly spoke of facing food insecurity as a nursing mother, scavenging for food in local shrubs and trees, hoping to find berries or apples, and going from department to department on campus, hoping to find a granola bar. She heartbreakingly shared how hard it was not to pick up a thrown out muffin off the floor to eat it because of how deep the hunger impacted her. She also spoke of her fears about becoming homeless again when she graduates from Berkeley this December with a 4.0 — wondering if it was all for naught.
Dominique, who lives in Michigan, talked about using the $1 she had left to buy her son a small order of french fries at McDonald’s because it was the only thing she could get him to eat. And how she would buy food for her kids and keep it in her car since she wasn’t allowed to bring food into the shelter and how someone once broke into her car and stole the food and her son’s snow boots. At one point she remembers sitting in her room at the shelter after her car was broken into, as her boys slept, trying to do homework and wondering if it was all worth it, questioning if it would just be easier to drop out of school.
Both discussed the hours they would spend on public transportation, having to leave three hours earlier than school started due to how long it took to navigate public transportation. How they faced getting physically assaulted in front of their children on the bus and how, being already time impoverished, they had even less time to spend with their kids, cook the food they would get from the food pantries, and do homework.
Cordero spoke about the pride he felt not only walking across the stage at commencement for his associate degree but also being one of the keynote speakers. He shared how his continued pursuit of higher education at Arizona State University in the Barrett Honors College has helped his kids see the opportunities they would have never had ahead of them. He shared how he has started working at the local prison and juvenile detentions to help provide opportunities to change the trajectory of the lives of incarcerated people and teens.
Needless to say, the day was one of the most powerful days I’ve had in quite some time. As I drove home that day, I thought about how much it took for each of these individuals to come to DC to meet with offices and relive challenging parts of their lives over and over as they shared their stories with each office. Yet, despite all the juggling and how exhausting it was to recall in detail parts of their lives they would rather forget, they felt compelled to prioritize this so that other students would not have to experience the same things they did. It made me thankful that I had the opportunity to spend a day with them and excited at the thought of what we could do with an even larger group of parenting students who would be willing to come and share their experiences with Congress in the hopes of making life better for their peers and those to follow suit.
