Jon Fansmith: Hello and welcome to dotEDU, the higher education policy podcast from the American Council on Education. I'm your host, Jon Fansmith, and a little bit later in this episode, my great colleagues Mushtaq and Sarah will be joined by Ardis Eschenberg, who is the Chancellor of Windward Community College and a real leader in the higher education community around issues of student parents. I think it's a great conversation. I had the opportunity to listen to it. I wasn't able to participate, but a great conversation and one, I think, a lot of our listeners will take away quite a bit from.
But before we get to Ardis, my aforementioned great colleagues, Sarah and Mushtaq, are here with me now ready to talk about, I don't know, there's a small election looming, there's some other things happening. It's mostly quiet end of the year, but probably a few things we can touch on.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah. And that is sarcasm for our listeners. I thought we were going to talk Halloween costumes. I thought that was why we were doing this podcast.
Jon Fansmith: I will wear what I always wear for Halloween, which is a Bad News Bears costume that I was given as a wedding gift. Yeah, no.
Sarah Spreitzer: Wow, that is way too much information.
Jon Fansmith: Don't ask me to explain it. I can't. But I wear it every year because it's just a big baseball jersey. I can pull on whatever seasonally appropriate attire I need to, so that's mine. But Sarah, it sounds like you have something you want to share with people.
Sarah Spreitzer: No, no. I had to actually make a Halloween costume this year for one of my kids who wants to be a haunted house, so that's about all the effort I'm putting in. But what about you, Mushtaq? Are you dressing up?
Mushtaq Gunja: I was thinking about being a Jolly Rancher. Over all-
Jon Fansmith: Like a happy cowboy?
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah, exactly. Happy cowboy.
Sarah Spreitzer: That's good.
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah, it's pretty good, right? We'll see. And by me dressing up, the question is really, can I just convince the kids to take my idea because there's no chance I'm going to be dressing up, except in my Ohtani jersey maybe, and my multiple Dodgers hats with hopefully a World Series to be able to celebrate.
Jon Fansmith: I was wondering how far into this podcast we'd get before you mentioned the Dodgers, who as of our recording on a Tuesday afternoon are up three-nothing, so might be a little presumptuous in terms of what's going to happen. Still plenty left to play possibly, but.
Mushtaq Gunja: Totally. Got past the Phillies really. That's the only thing I was...
Jon Fansmith: Phillies did not put much of a fight, sadly.
Sarah Spreitzer: Are you-
Jon Fansmith: Sarah...
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah.
Jon Fansmith: ... Thoughts on the baseball playoffs?
Sarah Spreitzer: No thoughts except are you trying to build up Mushtaq's anxiety more about a different topic beyond just the upcoming election? The question is he more anxious about the playoffs or is he more anxious about the election next week?
Mushtaq Gunja: I'm always more anxious about the election. No, actually I woke up the other morning and we wake up and we've got one of those smart speakers in the bedroom and I asked it to play the news and the first story was about the elections in Georgia and I thought that maybe I was still sleeping and that we were talking about our elections, but apparently the country of Georgia also had elections last week.
Jon Fansmith: How did Trump perform in those elections?
Mushtaq Gunja: Well, no matter what actually happened, he will say that he won those elections fair and square, "Perfect election," I'm sure he will say.
But yeah, no, the elections are coming and can't wait to talk about it with you guys. Do you have predictions for what's going to happen on the big day? Big week?
Sarah Spreitzer: I don't think we're... It's interesting because we're doing that live podcast on November 6th at 2:30 P.M. eastern time, and I know our hosts are going to put that in the show notes, but are we even going to know anything? I can make a prediction now, but I have no idea and I think that's where some of the anxiety is coming from.
Whoever wins... I think it's really neck-to-neck for the White House. Whoever wins, is it going to be a decisive enough victory where it's not going to be this drawn-out process of recounts and court cases and protests and things like that? And I don't know.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, it is the silly season now too as we close in because it's one of those things... I spend a lot of time digging into polling numbers and what the betting markets are saying and things like that, and as much trying to explain to other people what the trends are and what they might indicate as to try and draw my own conclusions. And you get to this point of the year where... I think Nate Silver sort of famously had that column about, "It's a coin flip, but my gut says Trump." I think I probably lie somewhere in there, but you start to see all these reports about, "Well, the leads are narrowing, but no wait, the pollsters are overweighting Trump responses to correct for under-representation in 2016 and 2020. So, the actual numbers are pulling much higher for her..." And I think you get to a point where, especially in a race... And it's not just for the presidency, but the House and the Senate, it's so close in so many places that you can go in and find the argument you want to find to support the conclusion you hope to see. But if anyone says they know what they're talking about at this point, they're just speculating.
Sarah Spreitzer: And I think that it... Also, I think back to 2016 when Trump was not expected to win. At the time, I thought the most surprising thing was how big his coattails were, because there were a lot of Republicans that were in danger that got over the finish line because people turned out at the polls to vote for President Trump and I think that's going to be the case again. If you had asked me two weeks ago, I'd say the House will be a Dem majority, the Senate will be Republican majority, but I really think it's going to come down to turnout for either party and that's really going to drive whoever's going to control whatever's going to happen in the House and Senate.
Jon Fansmith: And since this is an audio-only podcast, the reason Sarah started laughing on that otherwise quite serious point was that balloons started flying across the screen for her. So, no idea why, but I guess people were celebrating another-
Sarah Spreitzer: Election early?
Jon Fansmith: Observation by Sarah.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah. It was because I was right.
Jon Fansmith: No, we could talk about this for a long time and we certainly don't have to, but one of the things that has been really interesting here about being in D.C. too is you talk to a lot of people who are involved in national politics and state campaigns at different levels and I have now heard from people who work for Democratic candidates and Democratic committees and people who work for Republican committees, Republican candidates. Our internal polling shows... Take the Republican ones. I've heard both. Our internal polling shows Trump actually is trailing enthusiasm for Republican candidates in swing states and things like that, all the way up to what you were just talking about. Candidate enthusiasm's low, but we think coattails for Trump may actually pull people over the finish line.
Same thing for Democrats. It's not the enthusiasm we're seeing the turnout, we're getting the responses to the ground game, it's not being captured in the polling, we feel very confident about where our numbers are, down to, we're worried about turnout being suppressed because of pessimism about Harris's chances, other things.
It really is. I don't... In some ways having more information in this case is clouding the picture rather than helping to clarify it.
But Mushtaq, you follow this probably more closely than anyone I know. I'm just curious about your take.
Mushtaq Gunja: A couple takes. One, I think it's always interesting to see where the candidates actually travel and where the ad dollars are going and not going. And on the ad dollar side, I have some tea-leaf reading that makes me feel like the Dems are in a little bit of a stronger position than maybe the prevailing sentiment is.
I think if you asked me, I would say it's very close and if you asked me to... I'll do the Nate silver and say I think that the Dems have slightly higher chance of winning the House.
On the Senate side, the map for the Democrats of course is very difficult. West Virginia is almost certainly lost. Montana, Tester is probably down four to six points, and it's not impossible for him to come back, but it seems like that's going to be pretty difficult. That puts the Republicans at 51 unless the Democrats pick up a Senate seat in Nebraska or Texas or Florida. I would put the chances in that order probably Nebraska, Texas, Florida, which is crazy to say. I'm not sure if you guys would agree. But possible.
But I think it's likely, probably if you asked me to choose, I would probably think that the Republicans are probably going to have at least a seat, maybe two... Maybe 51 or 52 seats depending on whether President Trump can win Ohio by more than 7, 8, 9 points. I think that's probably the margin that Brown needs to keep that race in, Sherrod Brown, for him to be able to keep that seat.
And then I think on the presidency... I think it's really close. The one thing I guess I'll say is looking historically there has been a lot of movement in the last week of these polls as though... Like, last remaining undecideds move. So, really we've been in a 50/50 position now for three-ish weeks I would say. Slight movement to Trump maybe, but not very much. But there are 2, 3 percent of folks that have not yet made up their mind, and I think they will make up their mind, or they will not vote, I guess. One of the two things will happen.
But we've seen some pretty significant shifts in the last weeks of the polls. Or in the last weeks leading up to the election in '12, those undecideds broke to Obama and '16 and '20 they broke to President Trump. And I think... It's funny, you might be able to capture some last second movement. It might be a little bit hard to tell, but so many of the pollsters have already put out their final polls. It's a little bit hard to know for sure what we will… For as quiet from a polling perspective as the last few weeks have been, I think these last five days could be really interesting. So, just a couple of things that I'm looking at.
Speaking of the election friends, it's coming, which means that we will be in the fabulous session known as the lame duck between Election Day and the new Congress. On a more serious note, I guess Jon, Sarah, what are you looking out for in those couple of months? What should our audience be thinking about?
Sarah Spreitzer: It's been weirdly busy. It's felt like staff are trying to tee things up to really hit the ground running when Congress gets back on November 12, but I think they're also conscious of how the election might turn the lame duck.
I think there's some bills that we're watching, about whether or not they'll be air dropped, bills that may have passed the House and whether they can get any traction in the Senate in the final few months of the 118th Congress.
But I really think it will depend on how the election goes and whether Speaker Jonson is going to remain Speaker for next year, whether or not it'll be a Harris or a Trump administration, but yeah. I think it'll be a different kind of lame duck, I think, because it's not just going to be approps NDAA. I think it's also going to be dealing with if it is a contested election. Right? Will Congress be doing anything around that?
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, we know appropriations is one that will be directly impacted by the outcome of the election because if you have leverage, and that means if you want, say Republicans or Democrats, one party control of Congress, they have no incentive to try to reach accommodation with their counterparts when they can wait a few months and have full control and exert their authority. So, we'll see that happen obviously in administration. Colors that mix as well too.
The other thing is this is a Congress that's been historically unproductive, so this is really the last bite at the apple for a lot of people who have priorities. And we tend to think about NDAA and approps are huge, massively impactful bills, really important. Those are the headliners. They have to do those.
There's a lot of little things that a lot of policymakers, a lot of members of Congress, have campaigned on that are their bills, that are their babies, are addressing issues that they think are important and they may not have the same profiles in those bigger ones, and this is their last chance in this Congress. Maybe if they're leaving Congress, their last chance at all to get that done.
So, Sarah talked about this. We've been hearing a lot of activity around unanimous consent. These bills that move very quickly because they're not objected to. Something along those lines. There's a bill around hazing, preventing hazing on college campuses, that passed the House with strong bipartisan support. Certainly, the sort of thing we'd expect to see move in the lame duck because again, bipartisan support, addresses an important issue, something we at ACE have been working on with the staff for a long time. So, those are the things you're looking at that I think may not be top of mind for the average person looking into this, but the kind of thing you can see moving in the lame duck session.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, it's going to be busy. I thought it was busy for a pre-election season. I think whatever happens, the lame duck is going to be a very busy lame duck session.
Jon Fansmith: There's a lot going on and certainly, we would've liked a quieter election season like we usually get. So, no sympathy for us, of course, but we'll keep you all posted on what's happening in that area.
We're also going to be right back after the break with Chancellor Eschenberg and the really good conversation around student parents and their access to higher education, their experience on a college campus. Mushtaq, Sarah, I know you had a lot of fun with that conversation, so look forward to hearing it. Back in a minute.
Mushtaq Gunja: And we are back, and we are joined by a very special host... Very special guest, Chancellor Ardis Eschenberg. Chancellor Eschenberg is the Chancellor of Windward Community College and has been since 2019. She served at Windward since, I think 2010, in a variety of roles, including the vice chancellor for academic affairs. Chancellor Eschenberg spent some time in Nebraska Indian Community College, working in a variety of roles including student affairs. She holds a Doctorate in philosophy and linguistics.
Dr. Eschenberg, welcome to the podcast! We're so happy to have you here.
Ardis Eschenberg: Aloha Mai. Thank you for having me today, Mushtaq and Sarah.
Sarah Spreitzer: We should say aloha since you didn't mention where Windward Community College is located, although many of our listeners may already know it's in lovely Hawaii.
Ardis Eschenberg: Yeah, we're on the island of O'ahu on the beautiful Windward side.
Mushtaq Gunja: I bet that our listeners-
Ardis Eschenberg: Lovely-
Mushtaq Gunja: I bet our listeners actually don't know as much about Windward Community College as they should. Chancellor Eschenberg, do you want to spend a little bit of time talking to our colleagues about that?
Ardis Eschenberg: Sure. Windward Community College located on the Windward, or rainy side, of O'ahu. My college itself is located at the foot of Mt. Keahiakahoe, and we have 2,700 to 2,800 students, variety of ages, a lot of early college students as well as students on this campus and in the University of Hawaii system. We share students throughout the community colleges.
On this island, we have four community colleges. There's also Leeward, Honolulu, and Kapi'olani. And then through online, we also have students on distance education from Maui College now, as well as Hawaii CC in Hilo and Kauai CC on the island of Kauai.
We have the highest percentage of Native Hawaiian students in the Hawaii system. We are at 42 to 44 percent of our students are native Hawaiian, which is above parity with our community. We really focus on serving our native Hawaiian students and our native Hawaiian community setting that as a foundation in what we do rather than something that we think about as adding on and it shows.
And excitingly we're at parity for our target population, native Hawaiians, in enrollment... At or above parity, I should say. Enrollment, persistence, and graduation at this point, including graduation by cohort. We've worked really diligently to think about how we serve and support and how we base the actions that we do, which is what we're now doing with student parents as well. Really intentionally focusing on a population that has barriers to education and thinking about how to remove barriers or make them surmountable.
We just got a grant to serve incarcerated men from Hawaii in Arizona, which you shouldn't be excited about incarceration perhaps, but this is really... We were the first UH college. We're the only college actually currently offering degree programs or Pell within incarcerated environments in Hawaii. We're at the women's correctional center, the youth correctional facility, and we're at Halawa, which is a men's correctional facility.
The women's and the youth are the only women's and youth facilities in the state, so we found it... And they're right in our area. We knew it was really important. We started there.
And when we were serving the men in Halawa, we realized that our classes kept shrinking and our students disappeared. Every few months they take a plane of men because the prison is overpopulated and we don't have other spaces in Hawaii, and they fly them to a private prison operated by Core Civic in Arizona, in Saguaro, in the middle of the desert, which makes it really difficult for their families to see them. It removes them from their culture and their 'Āina, their land, and creates this even bigger gap.
We already know with incarceration, you have this gap where you're in a sensory-deprived environment and you're removed from technology and things that are changing, so you come out already with potentially this gap in knowledge and skills just from not being part of the community. And so we thought... And now we're not even just removing them in time like that, but we're removing them in place. So, we decided it was really important to serve these men. There's over 500 men from Hawaii in this facility, and so we went out to the facility and met with them and they were excited. We're going to offer our AA in Hawaiian studies. We'll offer our first class in the spring. We received a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Title III, Native Hawaiian Serving Institutions, to do it.
We're also partnering with Leeward and Kauai CC who will be offering post-release opportunities for those students who are released into their communities afterwards. So, really thinking holistically of how we serve not only inside, but outside.
I think that's one of my pieces of joy, even though of course we'd love to end incarceration, but at least being able to serve and create this pilina, this relationship, between these men and their culture, their 'Āina, and their place of being. I'm so blessed and lucky to work in a place where we can vision things and make it happen.
We also have some great funders. U.S. Department of Ed, Harold Castle Foundation has made us a lot of this work possible.
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah. What great examples of the school really serving and trying to identify the needs of the local population and then going out and actually creating programs that serve those populations. Just incredible work.
You referenced your work around student parents a few minutes ago, and I wanted to dig in a little bit there, if that's okay. Is this a population that Windward is... Do you have a lot of student parents and is this population that's been growing over time?
Ardis Eschenberg: Yeah. I've been here since 2010, and I remember that we had a planning and budget committee right around maybe 2011, 2012, and parents came in and said, "Hey, there's a childcare center on our master plan from 1982, and nothing's been done about it, and we really need childcare on campus." And there was another administrator who leaned over into my ear and said, "Not while I'm here." And I thought... I at the time had two young children, was struggling as a single mom to figure out how to be a full-time administrator and keep my children relatively not feral, so that's my standard in my household. Are they completely feral or just somewhat feral? And I thought about the callousness of our institutions and not thinking about student parents who we know nationally are about 22 percent of our population.
At Windward, we believe it might be actually a little higher, but it's really hard to get the data on that because Hawaii doesn't include that as part of the application process like other states, so we do surveys, we use FASFA data off of our databases. We do a lot of outreach and we use the childcare center.
Okay, so fast forward... fast rewind?... t0 2014, we got a small grant from AAUW for a campus action plan. We got together our student parents that we knew of through our Paipai o Ko'olau Scholars Program, which is a scholars program for returning adults, those that have barriers, foster youth, different populations, and they had a lot of student parents. They surveyed the campus, they created a resource inventory of this side of the island, and they came up with an action plan for getting a child care center. Who should it address, what ages are most priority, and also how should it be conducted? And the plan was to create a Hawaiian immersion, so Hawaiian language-based childcare center, to best serve the needs of our side and to serve as a model and for it to focus on infants and toddlers, which is a hard group. It's really expensive because your ratios are really small, one to six and one to eight, plus you need substitutes for lunch and such.
It was a real uphill battle, but again, U.S. Department of Education, Title III Native Hawaiian Serving, they put out a grant that year for renovation. It was... Whether you believe in Providence or Ku or God or whatever you want to believe in, even just fate, luck, whatever, it was really amazing. We finished that action plan. The students finished the action plan. We wrote the grant together. They helped me to write that grant. We got it. We built the childcare center and in 2019, it opened its doors.
In the beginning it was all for students because it was grant funded and now half the seats are reserved. We have one infant, and this year we added a second toddler classroom, so we have two toddler classrooms completely full with a wait list.
Mushtaq Gunja: Congratulations!
Ardis Eschenberg: It's been an amazing journey, and I feel like this is the one where if I got a tattoo, it would be [inaudible 00:24:07] because every time it started to fall apart, legal or whatever else, somebody would swoop in and save the day. And really, I think it was because it was so driven by students and student needs, it was the right thing to do.
Mushtaq Gunja: My wife teaches at a school that has an infant/toddler center, and my children went to that ITC growing up, and I know the regulations are different. I know that there's a whole set of red tape that one has to go through, and the needs of the population, of course, are very different. So, congratulations on a huge uphill climb.
Can I ask? You said that a colleague whispered to you that it'll never get it done. Was that because they were ideologically opposed to it, that they thought it was just too logistically difficult, too financially difficult? What was behind that sentiment?
Ardis Eschenberg: I think... When we built the center, actually, we had anonymous discussion boards and so I can't read a given person... A very nice person actually. You would not be like, "Oh, that person hates children." No, very nice person, but I think... First of all, there's so much risk and liability. Building in general is painful and very costly in Hawaii and require... We had to find extramural funding to make it happen.
And then running it, we still have two to three grants going all the time to [inaudible 00:25:36] ours, because we don't have an early childhood education degree or certificate at our campus. Ours is done as a revenue generating model, which means it has to turn a profit, which on childcare, that's crazy. The only way we do that is by constantly writing grants to support that. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to have the seats reserved for students.
So, I think it's just that. And then there was a lot of... The idea of what college is for and who it serves has really changed in the past, say three... It's probably changed every decade, but in the past couple decades, it's really changed. And so when we did that anonymous discussion board, we got things like, "I don't want to have to hear children. It's going to be too much noise on our campus." And I've heard other institutions have that too and, "This isn't our purpose. We're here to serve adult learners, not child learners," which is versus this idea of intergenerational learning and bringing multiple generations, because what education does. If you educate a mom, you're bringing that whole family out of poverty hopefully as an outcome and we want it to happen faster, not by having to wait.
But I have to say, since we built it, we haven't had any noise complaints or complaints about how we shouldn't have kids on campus. There's some policies and such about kids on campus, but for the most part it's been a success and we have student workers there. Students who've gone through K-12 immersion schools. My own daughter went to Samuel Kamakau, which is a Hawaiian language charter school. When they come in as freshmen can get hired by childcare center as student workers because they already... 'Ōlelo, they already speak in the language.
So, it's helping not just those children or just those parents, but it's bringing in different communities too through the language. It's really fun.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah. And Chancellor, did you see a change once you established the childcare? Did you start seeing student parents complete their degrees faster, less need for night classes... I guess what I'm getting at, were there were things that student parents needed to help support them? Did you have to make some tweaks to the child care when it started to really support those student parents?
Ardis Eschenberg: Yeah. I totally believe in trying things and failing and seeing what we did wrong or what we could do differently. So, we've had some fail-ups and we've had some providence and we've had some really interesting things.
Thinking 2019 being when we opened it, the first thing that we had was before the childcare center, there was really this idea that night classes could serve students, especially student parents because night would be a better time for them to take classes. And there was an idea that our campus, which is relatively small, 2,700 students, wasn't doing a full nighttime schedule. That is that... We just had a couple classes because nothing filled. We didn't have any services. It was really dark at night. Nobody wanted to come to get... There were all these hypotheses going around that if we had a robust evening program, that could serve student parents and maybe even you wouldn't need child care as much, because they have other options at night.
So, we got a grant, U.S. Department of Education, richly, fully, robustly supported a night program, an evening college here at Windward. We opened our library till 9:00 P.M. We centered these classes in the buildings that were nearest the library. We put security over there. We brought some... I donated ramen, so there was some kind of food at the library. And we bought a coffee pot to heat up water for it. We really tried to... We put a photocopier in so the professors would have access as well as students for printing, because sometimes that's an issue if every place to print is closed.
What we found was after five years, it had no impact. That wasn't the way to serve student parents because that's when their kids are doing sports and homework and taking baths and it's the only time you get to see them possibly.
And so that was a fail up, but we've also had some real... 2019, again, year before CIVID, we opened. COVID hit and we had to close our center. All the centers in Hawaii closed. And what we got was we had had one year of data of seeing our students who had childcare thrive. They were doing better than the regular population in GPA, course completion... That was all we had. We didn't have a lot of degree completion at that point because it wasn't a long enough time.
When it closed, particularly the parents of toddlers, because think about toddlers running around, being mischievous, because that's what they're supposed to do to learn at that age. Then within one semester, that first semester of COVID, they were then by the same percentage they had been over achieving the general population, they were then under achieving that general population. Just one semester.
So, you saw that childcare... Which there were other things that changed too, but our other student grades didn't plummet like that. Childcare was super impactful, so we knew the childcare center was serving this population, especially the toddler parents, in a really robust way. We opened as quickly as we could, and we tried to really because of that set aside seats for the children of student parents.
And the other thing that happened in 2019/20 was because of COVID and moving everything online, we developed a very robust, not just set of online classes, because we had a lot of our classes online, but the supports. We really intentionally rethought how can all students access supports online? How can we make our classes more enriched so they get a similar experience? I think the childcare center and that movement really served to change the dynamics for student parents on our campus.
We went from having... Pre-pandemic, we had a five-year gap in how long it took a student parent to complete their degree. Five years. It was 3.9 for our average students. It was 8.8 for student parents. The same number of semesters... They both took just under six semesters to complete the degree, but student parents stopped, started, stopped, started as they had children and their children had other responsibilities that they added to their lives.
As of last spring, we have no gap anymore. It's 2.6 and 2.3, around there, so they're both taking about two and a half years for their two-year degree, two and a half to three years. So, that gap is closed. It's still there, but it's really, really tiny at this point. And it was a consistent trend where it funneled down over those past five years.
We know that childcare helps, but I don't want to also leave out the part of that robust online learning because we know our student parents on average take more online classes, but they also succeed a little bit better online than the general population. And they do that to fit their schedule. They can be here during the day if we have childcare, but maybe they need one more class and that has helped them to decrease time to degree, because they no longer have to drop out for kids and they can take that one more class that maybe didn't fit their daytime schedule that great, but they can do it on the weekends and keep up.
So, that was really... When I got to see that data... As an administrator, sometimes we do a lot of intentional work around something and we don't, as they say, move the needle. I hate that expression, but I can't think of a better one. We don't really see the change that we're looking for, but with student parents, we've completely seen that. And we knew even before we went into the work of the childcare center and different supports, we knew that student parents really could succeed and thrive except for certain parts of their context. And going through that, we got to really see that it was the case.
Before we even started everything, student parents already had a higher GPA, they had a higher success rate in the classes they were taking. It was just taking a really long time for them.
Yeah, it's exciting. We've had some other things that were funny. We had this idea that they needed a support group. If they met every month, it would be good for them because they could complain to each other and support each other and maybe even find ways to help each other. And when we talk to the student parents... And we usually use the childcare center as a focus group. They're like, "Please do not give us one more thing. We do not one more meeting-"
Sarah Spreitzer: One more meeting to go to.
Ardis Eschenberg: Yeah. And nationwide, people always talk about these support groups and Windward people, were like, "No."
Sarah Spreitzer: No. I wonder, are there gaps that you've identified? I am thinking like sick care or-
Ardis Eschenberg: Oh yeah.
Sarah Spreitzer: What happens if they're not toddlers? I don't know. Does Hawaii have preschool, pre-k? Are there gaps that you think still need to be addressed through these types of programs?
Ardis Eschenberg: Yeah, there are definitely huge gaps for student parents and some of it... Even I find physically difficult to figure out how to navigate drop-in care. I only need care for today because I have a regular sitter, but they're sick or sick care. That's almost one-to-one care because you can't have three different sick children giving each other those sicknesses.
So, those are the more... But there's things that we have to think about and figure out and how do we do that? Or how do we ameliorate? Some of those we've thought about, our faculty are kind and hardworking and really think about our students in deeper ways. And I know they try to emulate... We have one instructor... We have instructors who record lessons and allow you to watch after. We have instructors who do Zoom while they're in the classroom teaching, so if a student's sick or parenting issue, they're outside.
But yeah, there are definitely gaps for student parents. The cost of care... We have a limited number of seats in our childcare center. If you don't get in, the cost of care, it's like $2,000 a month for an infant. And how much is Pell? It's around what, six thousand-ish? You get three months of childcare plus no place to stay. No...
And in Hawaii, our economic system, the only place that is comparable to the economics of Hawaii is Manhattan. We have the same cost of living as living in Manhattan, but Manhattan has more millionaires per square inch than any other place in the country. Hawaii doesn't. I'm not from Hawaii or Native Hawaiian. I'm really lucky to live here, so it's my job to make it a better place for those who do live here.
Sarah Spreitzer: I want to hear about the childcare in five years, 10 years, and see... I'd love to see how much you build on the success that you've already had in a very short time.
Ardis Eschenberg: Thank you. I think the fun thing right now is it's becoming more of a national movement. Within Hawaii, we're building more preschools that are attached to your K-12 schools. We hear more about the importance of childcare. It's beautiful that this has become an elevated... The ACE study recently on student parents. This has become elevated through the work of a lot of people noticing and then doing.
It's the people that matter. I've talked about my faculty and staff. Even childcare, I didn't know how to make it happen until one time I was in a parking lot talking to my son's teacher and she said, "I've always wanted to do a Hawaiian language infant and toddler childcare." And all of a sudden I went from, "Who on earth is going to run this facility? To having a person who could run this facility. And indeed, she's still our Director. She writes grants, she completely runs it. Puanani Kama, Dr. Puanani Kama. She's amazing. And it allows me too, where I don't have to worry about that. I know that she's got it, and I've known she's got it since 2014.
Sarah Spreitzer: That's so great. And those are the people that make our institutions run. We're so grateful for them. Thank you so much.
Ardis Eschenberg: Thank you guys for this. This was fun.
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