BYU created this family-friendly study room to provide a space that met the needs of students with young children. (Photo taken by Weston Smith)

The summer before my senior year at BYU, I found myself studying in the campus library to the whirl of power tools and the smell of sawdust. Distracted, irritated, and eager to learn what new renovation project the university was blowing our tuition money on this time, I wandered over to  the construction area, and I found a sign announcing a baby-friendly study zone. A few months later, the library’s family-friendly study area opened its doors. It featured a wooden play fort, a child-sized tables, a nursing area with cushy rocking chairs, and lots of toys. It was such a cozy study space that the library staff eventually had to put up a sign telling students without kids to quit hogging the tables. 

BYU HAS MADE ACCOMODATING STUDENTS WITH CHILDREN A PRIORITY

    During the six and a half years it took for me to get my BA and MFA from Brigham Young University, I watched many professors accommodate students with young children. My human development professor, who had an academic interest in the flourishing of mother and child alike, announced on the first day that student mothers were welcome to bring a baby monitor to class. If they had to step outside with a fussy infant, they could leave a monitor on his lectern and listen in from the hallway. My creative writing professor let my friend’s daughter crawl around on top of our conference table when she wasn’t being passed from student to student because everyone wanted to bounce her in their lap. When a boy in my Spanish class began bringing his two-year-old son to campus with him after his wife’s work schedule changed, our professor let the little boy toddle around the classroom and even held her student’s baby on her hip and let him play with her hair so the dad would be free to take notes. Some might say that children shouldn’t be allowed in the classroom to avoid distracting other students. I always figured that if I could pay attention in class when I’d really rather scroll through Instagram, a baby is not going to distract me more than my own laptop.

    During my graduate studies, I began teaching a few lower-level undergraduate English courses. Inspired by these baby-friendly professors, I made sure to talk about accommodating pregnant and parenting students in my syllabus, and I let them know they could bring children to class.

HOW CAN SCHOOLS ACCOMMODATE PREGNANT AND PARENTING STUDENTS?

    While I’d always thought baby-friendly professors were going above and beyond, I realized it’s astonishingly easy to make the classroom a good place for students with kids. Not all students want to bring their kids to class (in four semesters, no one took me up on my offer), so the main thing they need is deadline extensions and virtual attendance options. BYU still has pandemic- era webcams mounted on the back walls of most classrooms and every school knows how to teach remotely now. Teachers can often grant due date extensions more easily than they let on. When the whole class turns in an assignment, they take days or weeks to grade, so if a student mother wants two extra days to finish her paper, I was too busy grading her classmates’ essays in the meantime to care. I routinely gave extensions to students for all sorts of reasons, but I found that students with children thanked me profusely when accommodating them was really no trouble.

PREGNANT STUDENTS STILL FACE DISCRIMINATION IN UTAH SCHOOLS

    If it’s so easy to accommodate student mothers, why don’t more teachers do it? Too many educators and school administrators have the attitude that female students should either drop out of school once they have children or tackle the daily grind of homework and class attendance without support from their schools. In 2022, a pregnant student successfully sued Salt Lake Community College for not accommodating her when her morning sickness forced her to miss class[1]. Title IX, the federal law that outlawed gender discrimination in American schools, actually considers pregnancy discrimination to be a form of gender discrimination. Sadly, this function of Title IX isn’t well known. I was a junior in college before I even knew that Title IX protected pregnant students, and I had to meet with BYU’s Title IX office staff themselves to learn that. I had dozens of professors mention gender discrimination as they passed out their syllabus on the first day of class, but none of them ever mentioned that women choosing to continue their education while pregnant or raising children had a legal right to be empowered.

    When colleges provide resources and accommodations for student parents, whether that’s something as major as remodeling a library or increasing awareness of the Title IX protections afforded to pregnant students, or the simple, everyday sort of accommodations, like letting a student call in from home with a baby on her lap, universities are removing barriers that could otherwise drive women to get an abortion or drop out of school.

    Though I’ve now graduated, I return regularly to my old college campus to visit my younger brothers and my pregnant sister-in-law, who will graduate next month. Whenever I find myself in the library, I take a peek into the kid-friendly study zone. Though I’m proud that the university took the time to fill the space with toys and create child-sized furniture, what I love most of all is that the kid study zone is positioned right on the ground floor of the library in the most trafficked hallway, a prominent signal to parents that they—and their children—belong.

Sources: https://kslnewsradio.com/1970261/slcc-pregnancy-title-ix-section-504/