Reopening the on campus childcare debate
You see how they spent our tuition on
beautifying the outside of their buildings
instead of on essential services for us.
You saw how they cut down a bunch of real trees and paved everything in the ‘D' Courtyard, while putting up tree-styled wallpaper inside.
The president of this college is taking in a six-digit income while sentencing students to a lifetime of debt by constantly raising tuition fees and finding new ways to profit from us. Not only do they raise the fees, they privatize and/or take away critical services like childcare because they say they can't afford it.
Welcome to Fanshawe College, an institution that last year alone spent over a half a million dollars on walls, gates, and fences around its perimeter in the interest of frustrating students and making our lives more difficult. Obviously this fence did nothing but impede student access to college and make us feel like we're learning in a prison.
But it's not just the metal bars surrounding us, it's also the hundreds of surveillance cameras they installed to monitor us. We are now watched in every hallway, lab, entrance, residence, parking lot, etc. How many millions out of our tuition fees do you think is being spent every year policing us, fencing us in and filming our every move?
They have millions for (in)security, millions for useless construction, millions for their corporate partners, millions for their overpaid administration, and those millions come from us. This is why they won't drop fees, increase services, or invest in their ‘community'. Instead of reinvesting our money back into us, they raise our tuition every year, charge us ridiculous amounts of money for our textbooks, cram us into overpriced residences, let corporations monopolize our food services to maximize profit and make us pay for everything from the gym, to the lockers and parking. They treat us like cash cows and milk us for everything we've got.
If all that wasn't enough, they even sell our school's walls as giant billboard advertisements, polluting our mental environment. I don't know about you, but I don't want to read cell phone ads while I take a piss or wash my hands in the bathroom.
It doesn't have to be this way. We can radically change how this college operates. We can substantially lower, or even follow Brazil, Ireland and Cuba's lead by eliminating tuition fees altogether. We can provide essential services like childcare, affordable student housing, and free breakfast programs; all we need to do is rearrange our priorities. Making post-secondary education accessible to everyone should be our first priority, not fences, facades and six-figure salaries.
Having a child is still one of the biggest barriers to continuing education. For many parents, especially single parents, finding child care makes attending college or university an unaffordable luxury and an unattainable goal. Parents who do work or study here need to find childcare off-campus, which is extremely expensive and in short supply. Some students even bring their kids out of town every day. Meanwhile, ‘K' building sits there, being used as extra office space, a ghost of what it was about five years ago.
‘K' building used to be Fanshawe's ‘kids building' an on-campus childcare centre that was of great benefit to both parents, and students in the Early Childhood Education program. But now that untold millions have been spent on fences, cameras, constables, facades, and exorbitant salaries, it's ‘not in the budget anymore'. Parents in the Fanshawe community deserve better.
As students it is our responsibility to leave this school a better place for those who come after us. We need to open up these institutions to everyone because education is a human right. We need to demand lower tuitions and better services to make education accessible for all. We need to take our money back from this greedy, self-serving administration, and stop paying for our own oppression. As students, we need to take the power back from the corporate sponsors, the out of touch officials and the rent-a-constables. This is our school and we should have a real say in how it is run.
Editorial opinions or comments expressed in this online edition of Interrobang newspaper reflect the views of the writer and are not those of the Interrobang or the Fanshawe Student Union. The Interrobang is published weekly by the Fanshawe Student Union at 1001 Fanshawe College Blvd., P.O. Box 7005, London, Ontario, N5Y 5R6 and distributed through the Fanshawe College community. Letters to the editor are welcome. All letters are subject to editing and should be emailed. All letters must be accompanied by contact information. Letters can also be submitted online by clicking here.
You saw how they cut down a bunch of real trees and paved everything in the ‘D' Courtyard, while putting up tree-styled wallpaper inside.
The president of this college is taking in a six-digit income while sentencing students to a lifetime of debt by constantly raising tuition fees and finding new ways to profit from us. Not only do they raise the fees, they privatize and/or take away critical services like childcare because they say they can't afford it.
Welcome to Fanshawe College, an institution that last year alone spent over a half a million dollars on walls, gates, and fences around its perimeter in the interest of frustrating students and making our lives more difficult. Obviously this fence did nothing but impede student access to college and make us feel like we're learning in a prison.
But it's not just the metal bars surrounding us, it's also the hundreds of surveillance cameras they installed to monitor us. We are now watched in every hallway, lab, entrance, residence, parking lot, etc. How many millions out of our tuition fees do you think is being spent every year policing us, fencing us in and filming our every move?
They have millions for (in)security, millions for useless construction, millions for their corporate partners, millions for their overpaid administration, and those millions come from us. This is why they won't drop fees, increase services, or invest in their ‘community'. Instead of reinvesting our money back into us, they raise our tuition every year, charge us ridiculous amounts of money for our textbooks, cram us into overpriced residences, let corporations monopolize our food services to maximize profit and make us pay for everything from the gym, to the lockers and parking. They treat us like cash cows and milk us for everything we've got.
If all that wasn't enough, they even sell our school's walls as giant billboard advertisements, polluting our mental environment. I don't know about you, but I don't want to read cell phone ads while I take a piss or wash my hands in the bathroom.
It doesn't have to be this way. We can radically change how this college operates. We can substantially lower, or even follow Brazil, Ireland and Cuba's lead by eliminating tuition fees altogether. We can provide essential services like childcare, affordable student housing, and free breakfast programs; all we need to do is rearrange our priorities. Making post-secondary education accessible to everyone should be our first priority, not fences, facades and six-figure salaries.
Having a child is still one of the biggest barriers to continuing education. For many parents, especially single parents, finding child care makes attending college or university an unaffordable luxury and an unattainable goal. Parents who do work or study here need to find childcare off-campus, which is extremely expensive and in short supply. Some students even bring their kids out of town every day. Meanwhile, ‘K' building sits there, being used as extra office space, a ghost of what it was about five years ago.
‘K' building used to be Fanshawe's ‘kids building' an on-campus childcare centre that was of great benefit to both parents, and students in the Early Childhood Education program. But now that untold millions have been spent on fences, cameras, constables, facades, and exorbitant salaries, it's ‘not in the budget anymore'. Parents in the Fanshawe community deserve better.
As students it is our responsibility to leave this school a better place for those who come after us. We need to open up these institutions to everyone because education is a human right. We need to demand lower tuitions and better services to make education accessible for all. We need to take our money back from this greedy, self-serving administration, and stop paying for our own oppression. As students, we need to take the power back from the corporate sponsors, the out of touch officials and the rent-a-constables. This is our school and we should have a real say in how it is run.
Editorial opinions or comments expressed in this online edition of Interrobang newspaper reflect the views of the writer and are not those of the Interrobang or the Fanshawe Student Union. The Interrobang is published weekly by the Fanshawe Student Union at 1001 Fanshawe College Blvd., P.O. Box 7005, London, Ontario, N5Y 5R6 and distributed through the Fanshawe College community. Letters to the editor are welcome. All letters are subject to editing and should be emailed. All letters must be accompanied by contact information. Letters can also be submitted online by clicking here.
