As UMCDC parents dug into the process and justifications for the announced UMCDC closure, a series of concerns arose that have been sorted into themes. We continue to advocate for an immediate halt to the planned closure, and for the University to take over the operation of the CDC at a central level and commit to continuing its operation. Our concerns are as follows:

Process Problems

• The decision to close the UMCDC was made by a small group of people, outside of University governance structures, and with no engagement of stakeholders.
• We are concerned that this process reflects a lack of understanding of the UMCDC’s role at the University, and an overestimation of a private partner’s ability to meet University need for high-quality early childhood education and care.
• The decision to put out an RFP for private partnership was made without any thorough analysis of the resulting costs that would be incurred to the University. Therefore, we are concerned that, should plans for the closure of the UMCDC proceed, the RFP may fail and the University would realize too late that the UMCDC was, in fact, the highest-quality and most cost-efficient option.
• In the UMCDC History, we detail the movement of UMCDC between the College of Education + Human Development and University Services over time. A critical entity used by members of the entire University should not be vulnerable to termination by a single college without a process that examines its value, the true costs to replace it, and alternative administrative solutions.

Corrections & Comments on Official University Statements

• There are dramatically fewer potentially viable alternatives to the UMCDC than the 495 that Dean Quam’s January 22 letter to UMCDC parents suggests. Detailed evidence of overall shortages in all regions of the state of Minnesota can be found in the 2017 Legislative Task Force on Access to Affordable Child Care.
• CEHD distributed a chart to deans that significantly downplayed and misrepresented the UMCDC’s quality and contributions to campus.
• In the February 8, 2018 KSTP-TV report on the petition, UMN VP for University and Government Relations Matt Kramer said, "Parents had a really good opportunity there, but not all parents did. We have 20,000 employees, and an extraordinarily small subset of them are allowed to benefit from this, at a subsidy, by the way, of the rest of the employees of the University of Minnesota." Most employee benefits are life-stage and lifestyle dependent. UMN does not have 20,000 employees with children ages 0-5. Moreover, Kramer’s argument discounts the UMCDC’s spillover effects on productivity (through which colleagues with no children or older children who work with UMCDC parents benefit from the institution). The effect of UMCDC is cumulative, and cannot be measured in raw numbers of current families served. Additionally, the UMCDC can be expanded, but this requires institutional will.
• The University has implied that the UMCDC must be closed because it serves too few children. Yet when it moved to its current building in 1992, the UMCDC doubled in size: from 75 to 140 children. Thus, the UMCDC can scale, and could do so either through additional space or modifications/additions to the existing building. The parking lot at the UMCDC is generally not full, even at peak drop-off and pick-up time, suggesting there is room for expansion on the current site (in the parking lot and elsewhere).

Negative Signal of Climate

• The University also recently decreased funding received by graduate students whose children attend the child-care facilities in family housing, CCCC and CELC. This funding made care more affordable. When we look at the past two years of decisions by the University of Minnesota, we are concerned about the University’s lack of concern for working families—including graduate students, who are in no financial shape to take on a higher cost burden.
• While these decisions affect working families, we know that, in many families, a disproportionate responsibility for caretaking falls to women. Thus, this is also an issue of gender equity on campus.
• The vast majority of teachers and staff at the UMCDC are women, of whom Dean Quam said in the January 24 Star Tribune article on the center’s closure, “I think there are people who can do as good a job if not better.” UMCDC’s world-class teachers and staff have been repeatedly debased in this process.
• Parents’ research-based response to the sudden closure announcement, which was made without appropriate process or governance, has been met with talking points by President Kaler that imply that the parental response has been emotional. This includes his February 2018 statement to the Board of Regents, in which he says, "I also know that families and staff who are directly affected by the news of the closing are understandably upset about the closing." There are moral and emotional cases to be made for the UMCDC, but we have avoided them because we know how gendered the language of advocacy for children is. Despite our analytical approach, the University administration has repeatedly resorted to such gendered language.