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College’s decision to close Gorse Children’s Center sparks outrage
Photo by Kate Turner ’21 Community members and families gathered at the gates on Thursday, Feb. 25, to protest the College’s announcement that it would close the Gorse Children’s Center, an on-campus day care used by community members.
BY CASEY ROEPKE ’21 & KATE TURNER ’21 NEWS EDITORS
“Mount Holyoke has removed a really key part of what made me feel safe — not just [as] an employee, but made me feel safe living here,” said Assistant Professor of Politics Ali Aslam, who faced uncertainty in his child care options after the College’s recent announcement that it would close the Gorse Children’s Center. On Wednesday, Feb. 24, Mount Holyoke announced in a public statement that it would be closing Gorse within the year. The announcement has been met with organized outcry from families of the center’s students and the wider community. The Gorse Children’s Center has a long-standing relationship with the College. According to the College’s website, the Gorse Lab School opened in 1952 in partnership with the psychology and education department. In 2008, Bright Horizons Children’s Centers LLC was selected as the management partner and entered into a contract with Mount Holyoke. The College previously partly subsidized Gorse tuition for some College-affiliated families through the Mount Holyoke College Child Care Scholarship Program. Under this program, full- or part-time employees — faculty and staff of the College — were eligible to receive scholarship as-
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sistance if they met an “annual household income of less than $85,000” and applied for the need-based scholarship program. Discounted rates were then accessible on a sliding scale. According to faculty parents of Gorse students, the on-campus child care offered by Gorse allows them to work without worrying about the safety of their children. “The service that is provided by Gorse is absolutely crucial for the faculty and staff at MHC to be able to do their jobs,” Associate Professor of Anthropology Elif Babül said. Babül’s description of the services provided by Gorse — full-time day care, including infant care, after-school care, College schedule coordination and transportation for students to and from public schools in South Hadley — indicates how interwoven with the lives of faculty and staff the child care service has been. Students, too, rely on Gorse, which was previously central to the College’s psychology and education program in its capacity as a laboratory school. The College announced the closure of Gorse on Wednesday, Feb. 24, two days after families were alerted to the change. In an online statement, it was explained that the College had formed an ad hoc committee on “employee caregiving issues”
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In a remote setting, the burden is on students of nontraditional age BY LILY REAVIS ’21 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
J.J. DiPietro left behind a different life when she chose to return to college as a nontraditionally aged student in 2018. She enrolled at Holyoke Community College for two years before moving to South Hadley, MA, and enrolling at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. For DiPietro, the switch to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic was a welcome change. Her two small dogs, privately owned cleaning business and general responsibilities of being an adult in college all benefited from the extra time spent at home. When UMass shifted to hybrid in-person and online learning this semester, though, DiPietro realized she was expected to travel to campus and participate in in-person events far more than she felt comfortable with. Living 30 minutes from campus with a relatively rigid schedule, she found it hard to keep up with twice-weekly student testing, and her professors were slow to communicate about required in-person activities. Now, DiPietro feels uncomfortable returning to campus due
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to the recent COVID-19 outbreak among students, and she’s found that faculty and administration are less flexible than previously during the pandemic. “Very few of the professors are even giving extensions and more take the stance of, you know, ‘If you just can’t do it, you need to drop the class,’” she explained. DiPietro is taking a hybrid mechanical engineering lab this semester. The course is a 300-level, meaning it’s mostly made up of upperclass students. In order to comply with the social distancing measures outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the students were split into several sets of partners this semester. Only six pairs are allowed inside the lab at any given time, and each is expected to attend three in-person lab sessions throughout the semester. Aside from those three sessions, DiPietro will remain in her off-campus housing for the entire semester. Living in South Hadley, she’s roughly 12 miles from campus, which adds up to a travel time of 20 minutes by car and 40 minutes CONTINUED ON PAGE 7
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