How Montgomery College is Making Student-Parent Work a Reality with FamilyU
Since June 2021, Generation Hope has been working with four teams of student parent champions from colleges and universities in the Washington DC metro region to enhance their supports for parenting college students through our innovative technical assistance program, FamilyU. This two-year cohort model involves each institution gathering a team of representatives spanning key departments to lead their student parent work. Guided by a work plan and a dedicated Generation Hope Coach who supports and facilitates their work, they are gaining a deeper understanding of the core competencies of successful student parent efforts while advancing transformative work across their institutions. Throughout the year, they also participate in interactive cohort convenings that create space for dialogue, learning, collaboration, and, most importantly, results.
Recently, Generation Hope’s Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Nicole Lynn Lewis, sat down with a current FamilyU Cohort participant, Dr. Ja’Bette Lozupone, who is the Director of Student Affairs at Montgomery College in Maryland, to talk about how the cohort experience has impacted Montgomery College’s student parent work. Their conversation below is excerpted and edited from our recent FamilyU Information Session on March 3, 2022.
Nicole: Can you introduce yourself and share a little bit about your journey to higher ed?
Dr. Lozupone: First, thank you for the opportunity to participate and share not just my story but my experience with Generation Hope. I hope that at the end of this, you will be really energized and excited about this opportunity, because it truly is an incredible, transformative opportunity. My name is Ja’Bette Lozupone. I came into this work because of my very personal experience as a teen mom. I got pregnant at 16 years old. It just so happened [that] I was already in college. I was living on campus, and before the next semester came, it was like, okay, it is now plus one for me.
“You hear all the time how resilient student parents are, and that’s because we have a real vested interest in becoming successful. ”
It’s interesting, I thought about everything that could go wrong — I never thought about the possibilities. There was this stigma immediately. You know, the red scarlet letter was on my forehead, and I didn’t want to become a statistic. So, my journey was a challenging one. Nicole understands that journey.
With a lot of help from mentors and people who refused to allow me to become a victim of my circumstance, I was able to get through my undergrad with a Bachelor’s in Communications. I then proceeded to get my Master’s in Business Administration, and then two years ago, I completed my Doctorate in Organizational Leadership. And I would not have been able to do it if I didn’t have the inspiration from my daughter, that drive. You hear all the time how resilient student parents are, and that’s because we have a real vested interest in becoming successful. I know that I did not want to become a statistic or a drain on society. I didn’t want to engage in a cycle of intergenerational poverty. So my education was my way out, I knew that and that was extremely important to me. It’s gotten me here. So again, it was the drive of my daughter and that very typical resilience that exists within the student parent population, but also key, critical people that were there loving, supporting, mentoring, encouraging, cheerleading, and getting me through.
Nicole: In your role at Montgomery College, clearly there has been a desire to help all students. But why has it been important for you to focus on student parents as well in that work? Of course you have the personal connection, but why is it important for a higher ed professional to ensure that student parents are factored into student affairs work?
Dr. Lozupone: At the end of the day, we know that 1 in 5 students is a student parent. We know that higher ed right now is struggling in dealing with massive enrollment and retention issues. Student parents are a massive population within the student body that has the potential to drive the institution forward.
A lot of what student parents need are exactly what other students need. I feel like student parents are well positioned to drive that work forward. When you think about that struggle of the balance of having multiple competing priorities, you’re overstretched — caregivers know what that’s like. The majority of our students — especially in community colleges, but we’re even seeing this in 4-year institutions — are working, they are first-gen, they are people of color, they have very different needs. And so, whatever we do to make education more accessible, more affordable, more flexible, all of those things that will without a doubt affect student parents are also going to directly impact other student populations. For me, there was no issue of how student parents fit into this narrative. Our students are student parents. Our students, the majority of them, are working and are having to balance competing priorities. So that, for me, was very easy to make that connection.
Nicole: How has being a part of FamilyU helped accelerate the student parent work at Montgomery College?
Dr. Lozupone: What’s really great is that this cohort opportunity came at a critical inflection point for us at Montgomery College. It allowed us to build momentum on the work that we had already begun at the institution. What was really exciting and also attractive about the Generation Hope [FamilyU] cohort program is that it’s designed in a way where you can get at the heart of an institution’s strengths to be able to leverage existing infrastructure, policy, programs, and so forth, and that you’re able to then maximize the potential in relevant areas to bolster success for student parents.
“Generation Hope, in that sense, has been the ultimate accountability partner.”
One of the things that I think is absolutely genius about [FamilyU] is that you have to include your institution’s decision makers or executive leadership on the institutional team. That is a huge gamechanger. When we came into the cohort, we absolutely had a core and an extended taskforce. Our core taskforce, because our work is driven by student affairs, they were student affairs representatives from critical areas. But our extended taskforce had individuals that represented critical areas from across the college in all divisions. Of course we were very intentional about how we designed that group, having folks not just in different areas but also different levels of the organization who have the power and the ability within their scope of responsibility to make changes. So you're actually able to get the ball rolling and begin to see change and an impact almost immediately — that builds in the buy-in that’s necessary to propel the work forward.
Generation Hope, in that sense, has been the ultimate accountability partner. That’s been really exciting for us. You have people that are in the upper echelons of the institution that have way more knowledge and oversight over critical areas of functionality, political nature, and things that are coming down the road. There’s a lot of brain power in that group, and folks have enough institutional knowledge that you’re not going to waste time on things that culturally, for one reason or another, are not going to gain traction. You can be really strategic in where you focus your attention — that’s crucial to moving the work forward.
Nicole: Can you give us an example of an “aha” moment you’ve had as a result of being a part of the FamilyU Cohort?
Dr. Lozupone: I was surprised by who and how many people are willing to invest in this work to improve outcomes for student parents and the fervor in which they’re engaged. I can honestly say that I didn’t expect that. I thought that this was really going to have to be me standing on a soap box by myself, trying to say, “Hey, this is important!” I was pleasantly pleased to see that that wasn’t the case. It’s been really wonderful to experience and leverage that passion and enthusiasm and the energy around student parents and supporting them. However, it has also been a reminder that everyone doesn’t get it — yet.
You want to start with a nice healthy group of people that are on your side, that are on student parents’ side. Clearly a lot of work remains to be done, but I’m saying that to get to this point: essentially there are going to be cultural realities that exist at your institution. Due to comfort with the status quo, there are going to be pockets of individuals that lean harder into existing policies that don’t necessarily serve student parents. I know one of the things at Montgomery College (we are a very large institution and are multi-campus) is that folks complain all the time about initiative fatigue. But overall, I have to say that I am genuinely impressed with my institution’s commitment to equity, to inclusion. This work fits very well into our equity work at the institution, and of course, just specifically calling out student parents. This is not just about ushering student parents into other categories. This is about naming the work that we have to do, and very strategically and thoughtfully looking at this very specific group of students. I’ve been very impressed by that.
Nicole: You touched on this earlier, but how do you think student parent efforts benefit all students?
Dr. Lozupone: It’s making us think a little bit differently about how we communicate with students, how we make sure that the right information gets into the right students’ hands.
“Whatever we do to make education more accessible, more affordable, more flexible, all of those things that will without a doubt affect student parents are also going to directly impact other student populations.”
A connection you might not think of is, when we’re talking to student parents we’re always like, “How do we get the information to you?” We hear people complain all the time about how students don’t check their email. Well, they’ve told us: text! If you text us, we’ll pay attention. This kind of substantiates the need for the institution to invest in technology to be able to send mass text messages to students. The fact that we’re doing work that allows us to hear that, gives us the data and support that we need to then help facilitate other efforts at the institution.
Another example that I’ll use is even with facilities. We’re doing some things really well. We have changing stations in some of our restrooms and we have lactation centers. But if you’re a dad and you’re taking a course in a specific building and you normally don’t bring your child with you, you might not realize that on the floor below you there’s a family restroom or that there’s a changing station in a certain bathroom, but not the one nearest to you. And so now, what we’re realizing as an institution is that we might have the resources, but we’re really not promoting them or maximizing awareness. And so, one of the things we’re working on right now is thinking about how we can create a map for student parents that shows where all the resources are that are of interest to them. We’re going to create a map, a guide, we’re going to put it on our website, we’re going to have digital signage, we’re going to do all of these things. It also helps us rethink how we help other students as well.
The 2022 FamilyU Cohort application is currently open for institutions across the U.S. You can learn more and find the application here. Applications are due May 13, 2022.