Please see the statement below which was presented to the Board by Benita Hunter:
Dear Board of Trustees
My name is Benita Hunter. I am a former Director of the Malcolm X College Child Care Center, full-time Faculty at Kennedy-King College, former Dean of Career Programs at Daley College,
and currently, Assistant Professor of Child Development, at Richard J. Daley College.
More important than all these titles, is the fact that my career path in education began as a Child Development AAS graduate from Malcolm X College; therefore, I am ideally qualified to address the proposed consolidation of the Child Development Program to a single college location.
I am here to speak on behalf of the future and current students not only enrolled at Daley College, but for the five other nationally accredited sister colleges, and over one hundred child care facilities and schools that provide teacher practice, internships and full-time jobs to our graduates.
For years, students have had the opportunity to earn a degree and provide quality instruction and care to children and their families, who reside in their own communities. Their own children attend school in the community and they do it in blighted neighborhoods that desperately need the conscientious care, knowledgeable instruction, and insight of this community – bound workforce of child development educators.
When students enroll in courses at each of the south and south west side campuses, it is because they welcome and embrace the core concept of the community college mission – – that they can receive an affordable, quality education and career in their own communities!
Effectively, Fall 2016 there will be; NO Child Development Programs offered by CCC on the South and South west sides of Chicago or in the
Black and Brown communities!
Are we now telling them that their communities are no longer capable of providing them with a quality education? That in order to receive an education in child development, they will have to travel across town to an area in which they are unfamiliar, have no stake or investment, and will take several hours to commute? Alternatively, that the most crucial components of early childhood practice, which are direct instruction, program management are to be relegated to a distant-learning, and impersonal on-line coursework process?
If we take away the Child Development Programs from the colleges on the south and south west sides of the city, then we are not only doing our students a grave disservice and injustice, but our communities as well! These are the locations wherein our students and the area stakeholders require our most comprehensive services, monetary expenditures, and humane considerations – – not the least. We are dealing with human capital, not impersonal data, dollars, and cents.
Please rethink this collaboration and consider the adverse effect such a thoughtless decision will have… on our students, young children and their families, the community stakeholders
And the colleges.
Thank you for your consideration
Benita Hunter
The Harold Lounge 