With the high expense of childcare, some students have said a day care is needed at Akins to help students who have their own children.

The average cost of a center-based daycare can range from $300 to $1,564 a month. Being a high school student and a parent you don’t have much time to work a full time job to be able to provide that much money a month.

Currently within the Austin school district four high schools have a child development center on their campus: Travis, LBJ, Reagan and Lanier.

School officials have said Akins is currently not eligible to provide a daycare for the teen moms here on campus.

To help student mothers take care of their children, Austin ISD provides an online program that helps alleviate the need for day care. Austin ISD offers the Virtual School for Teen Parents program (VSTP) for parents who do not have anyone to care for their child or if they want to care for them at home.

The program allows students to do online school work on a computer at home and they can also have their teacher meet them at their house two times a week. Students can utilize this program for a whole school year if there is enough available spots. Spots are limited because there are only a few teachers available to do the home visits.

While the online program is helpful for some teen parents, on campus daycare programs provide benefits that a computer-based solution simply cannot. For example, the online program does not provide for elective credits and students must now have to take a sequence of elective classes to graduate. So eventually, the teen parent is going to have to come back to campus if they want to graduate.

There are plenty of teen moms that miss school to take care of their child because their babysitter bailed on them or they just couldn’t find anyone. Eventually, they’re going to miss a lot of school and fail to meet graduation requirements.

It would be very fortunate for these teen parents to have them in an on-campus daycare because during lunch or any time they have they can go see their child.

I have seen student mothers in classes who are constantly checking their cell phones because they are try- ing to communicate with a babysitter. It takes away from their learning time when they have to constantly be worried about how their child is doing while they are at school.

I am no mom but I can only imagine how hard it must be to come back to school after having a baby.

With all this being said, I believe we should do more for the teen parents that are actually trying to finish their education, granted that it’s not the the school’s responsibility but the deed is done is there is nothing that can change that.