MSCHE Pillars of Change
MSCHE Pillars of Change
Episode 12 - Monroe Community College President DeAnna Burt-Nanna on Supporting Student Parents
In the 12th episode of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE) Pillars of Change Podcast, Commissioner Susan Looney, President of Reading Area Community College, hosted DeAnna Burt-Nanna, President of Monroe Community College (MCC) in New York.
The two discussed MCC’s initiatives to support student parent learners. MCC is one of four U.S. community colleges collaborating with the national nonprofit Education Design Lab to help raise completion rates for single mother learners, and it is the first college in the U.S. to collect data on their students’ marital and parental status to uncover student parent needs. In spring 2022, MCC launched Single Mom Success Design Challenge to provide critical holistic support and referrals to community resources for single mom learners.
The college serves more than 23,000 students across four campuses and offers more than 100 degree and certificate programs.
00:00:16 Susan Looney
Welcome to the Pillars of Change Podcast presented by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. My name is Susan Looney, and I serve as the proud president of Reading Area Community College and a Middle States Commissioner. Thank you for joining me for the Commission's continuing series of podcasts, focusing on topics of diversity, equity and inclusion. This podcast series spotlights highly effective institutional practices tied to diversity, equity and inclusion that have made a difference in the lives of our students. Today, we are talking to DeAnna Burt-Nanna, President of Monroe Community College in New York. MCC serves more than 23,000 students across four campuses and offers more than 100 degree and certificate programs. For the past three years, MCC's enrollment has been on the incline with a notable increase of the number of student parents served by the institution. At MCC, one in five students are student parents. In a 2023 interview conducted by The Working Nation, MCC reported that single mothers feel a great sense of isolation, so the college has been working to create a more inclusive and supportive experience for single mothers pursuing a college education to increase college participation and students’ post completion success. MCC is one of four US community colleges collaborating with the national nonprofit Education Design Lab to help raise completion rates for single mother learners by 30% by summer 2024. They're the first college in the US to collect data on their students’ marital and parental status to uncover student parent needs, which they found to include access to emergency grants, affordable childcare and flexible course and service delivery modalities. In spring 2022, in response to the students’ needs, MCC launched single Mom Success Design Challenge to provide critical holistic support and referrals to community resources for single mom learners. Now, MCC is exploring the possibility of creating on-campus family housing for their single parent students. I welcome President Burt-Nanna to the podcast today.
00:03:01 DeAnna Burt-Nanna
Thank you, Susan. It's a pleasure to be with you today.
00:03:05 Susan Looney
Thank you so much and thank you for joining us. This is an amazing initiative. Can you briefly describe how MCC Student Parent Initiative began?
00:03:16 DeAnna Burt-Nanna
I can and I'm really grateful that this platform has been created to talk about something that, nationally, we're all so intrigued and committed to doing, and that's helping even more students be successful. For us, in 2019, MCC and three other colleges received the Single Moms Success Design Challenge Grant from the Education Design Lab and the goal of that grant and even beyond 2024 is to provide critical support and community connections to single mother learners and to increase their completion rates on average, student parents are 20% of our student population at Monroe Community College, so significant proportion of our students, and over the 2023-24 academic year, the Single Mom Design Challenge support team that has worked with our Institutional research department. We got an update on the status of how those student parents are doing at MCC and in the fall of 2023, they shared the following data points with us that I'd love to be able to highlight here. MCC has over 1300 student parents enrolled as of fall 2023. And most of our student parents meet, would be considered, single parents, female, between the ages of 30 to 44, very interesting statistic, I think. The vast majority are African Americans. Then the next largest proportion would identify as white and then Hispanic. And also these students are generally enrolled full time, so I thought that those might be some things to share that might peak your interest.
00:05:10 Susan Looney
Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you for sharing your demographics for your students because of course we all have, you know, a different area that we're serving. So DeAnna, since you began in collaboration with the Education Design Lab, how is the experience of student parents at MCC become more inclusive and equitable?
00:05:31 DeAnna Burt-Nanna
Well, I'm glad that we're having this conversation about equity and inclusion of our students and the Education Design Lab really should be commended for being at the cutting edge of examining factors that would otherwise limit single moms’ participation in college. As I found throughout my career in higher education, by learning to support a special population of students, you gain insights about what benefits all students and even from my personal experience of being a mom of a child that's uniquely abled and advocating for him when the benefits came to aid him being successful, all students gained that were participating in that learning experience or at that institution. But what we've learned is that putting our students in the driver's seat is critical. Let them shape their learning experience and partnership with college staff. They know themselves and their fellow students even better than we do. And to that end, Ashley Moore Reader wrote in four ways to meet student parents needs on campus, one way to support student parents is to assign a liaison who acts as a single point of contact for us. That person in the 23-24 academic year was Renee Dimino and she is in our English for speakers of other language department of our college, and she serves as the single mom learners success coach. In this role, Renee coaches students by sharing resources and helping them to navigate higher education. Also, to learn from our student parents, just this spring, in spring 2024, we conducted four focus groups with 14 student parents. They hear about their lived experiences and how effective the supported MCC is for student parents. There is no true substitute for the voice of the student. In higher education, we need to seek more input from our students to inform our decisions. In these sessions with students, we focused on topics like the importance of networking with each other, understanding and support from professors navigating the available support struggles with academic pressures and you know the bus pass and transportation and convenience issues that they were facing. So what did we learn from them? We learned that MCC provides clear, detailed information that they find beneficial, that resources such as tutoring services, food pantry and support for struggling students were appreciated. The college was they described the colleges as offering various resources that made them feel supported and at home. Flexibility with scheduling of their courses such as evening classes and online classes, were very valued by them. And of course, professors and staff, we know this. All the research continues to tell us how critical our teaching staff and our staff throughout the college are to student success. The students describe them as understanding and accommodating, particularly for students returning to college after a long gap. They also appreciated that they could meet with advisors and professors via Zoom and other remote options. And here's just, I'll just give you like one quote from a student that participated in the group. A student says. “So the most positive thing, I think, is that my entire mindset has changed. I think I'm a better mom, a better person, a better worker. Because I've been exploring what's out there as a single mom, I already feel like, ‘OK, I have to stay here in my little corner,’ but I've been out there and MCC has given me a lot of hope that I didn't have before and the most challenging have been doing it all by myself. I know that Monroe Community College offers a lot of support.” I just think that that's amazing. Other things that we learned is like other historically marginalized groups, single moms benefit from inescapable access to support in order to increase their confidence that they're capable of succeeding and can attain their goals. And at Monroe, we amplified our focus on creating a sense of belonging for all of our students. Intentionally creating connections to the institution and diverse learners and placing supports within reach so they could demonstrate self-efficacy. And back in 2019, when we embarked on this endeavor to help single moms, the goal was to increase the graduation rate by 30%, going from 10% to 13% by 2024. The six year graduation rate, the rate used in this grant for the incoming fall 2018 Single Moms Learners was 18.8% surpassing even what we thought we could do with the grant.
00:10:56 Susan Looney
That is incredible. That is an amazing increase, but it makes sense with the -- I love the quote by the student that was, that was fabulous and the sense of belonging and hope. I think that's what we aspire for all of our students to feel when they come to our institutions. But congratulations, that is fabulous, fabulous results and ultimately changing the lives of our students for the better. What are some of the existing barriers to completion for student parents? I know you mentioned a few, but are there still some existing barriers that are in place?
00:11:43 DeAnna Burt-Nanna
Unfortunately, yes, Susan. It was sobering to learn through the voices of our students and many of them. We're experiencing a sense of isolation, their words, believing that they were the only ones navigating life as a parent, or even a single parent. For some of them, they perceive this even as a stigma of shame, which only perpetuated their feelings of isolation. Through our work with Education Design Labs, we have connected these learners with peers to create community and belongingness. Research has repeatedly demonstrated time and time again. The students feel they belong in our institutions. You know this Susan. They are motivated to succeed. And through the pilot that we were able to do, we intentionally placed support within reach of approximately 6000 single mom learners. That's just amazing to have that kind of impact, to have the resources afforded to us to impact that many futures. During that period of time, some of the benefits provided to those students, it connected student parents to academic and non-academic supports and resources on campus and off campus. We collected and communicated data about student parents to the college community as a whole so we could all learn together as a learning organization. Our single mom learner's success coach acted as an MCC point of contact, an advocate for our student parents and created community within single parent groups through e-mail, communications and events. Shared information on strategies to address student parent needs with the college community we hosted professional development opportunities about how to support these amazing learners on our campus so that we could all grow together as staff, faculty and administrators. We also expanded our childcare council participation, our partnerships so that referrals can be made to single mothers when they needed assistance, that proactive, inclusive approach. The Child Care Council at our institution is an organization that assists both child caregivers and parents and in 2020 MCC expanded its relationship with them. When a student parent needs assistance with childcare, let's say, we refer them to the Childcare Council in our community, they help them find the childcare that's right for their situation and which might be in-home childcare or at a center. We know that single mothers are much less likely to complete a degree than students without children. We found that student parents with children under age 6 who used our on campus childcare center were 18% more likely to return to school and three times more likely to graduate than student parents who did not use our on campus Childcare Center. We also have a partnership in our area with the Rochester City School District to provide pre-, early pre-K, and three year old, and pre Kindergarten, four year old classes for families in the Rochester City School District. So in our community. And our Richard M. Guon Child Care Center at Monroe Community College recently received reaccreditation by the National Association for the Education of Young Children, achieving high scores for quality based on national standards. Less than 10% of the nation's childcare centers, preschools, and kindergartens have achieved that kind of accreditation. We also have emergency funds to help single mothers pay for qualified college expenses, cover basic needs, and other costs that could otherwise present a barrier for them attending college. And at our college also, for all of our students, we have what's called DWIGHT and DWIGHT stands for Doing What Is Good and Healthy Together. It's our on-campus food pantry created to support students in need of food and additional resources to help those who are having difficulty making ends meet. We have served over 4300 adults and over 1600 children through that resource. We're really proud of it.
00:16:42 Susan Looney
As you should be, I mean, and congratulations, the center sounds fabulous, and it sounds like you've got so many best practices. What can other institutions learn from MCC student parent initiative? I mean, there's just so much great initiatives that that you're working on. But what can other institutions learn from you?
00:17:08 DeAnna Burt-Nanna
Well, I'm just encouraged nationwide at the increased focus on better serving student parents as a whole cross, our community colleges, not only at Monroe, but across this nation. We weren't talking about this even five years ago. You weren't hearing much about it. Now everyone's leaning in and paying attention to better understand it. In fact, the work we're doing at Monroe has gotten some terrific attention, including by the Washington Post and most recently in an American Association of Community College, AACC, piece on addressing single mother student needs. They're really proud of that. And then, as you mentioned earlier, Working Nation and organization that looks at the future of work featured Monroe efforts in their recent documentary on Single Moms Too. So we should expect this population to increase and not decrease in our institutions as we see more adult learners participating in post-secondary education. You heard me earlier give you a demographic that these students generally fall between the age of 30 and 44. That's different. Not that there aren't other students that are outside of that particular, but predominantly that that's the that's who we're serving and we need to understand what their needs are, but whether we're exploring how to support this population or like Monroe. If an institution is just seeking how to do more for all of its students, our advice is to intentionally create a community for students, including single moms, using the voice of students to design accessible programming. We want to streamline career pathways that lead to family sustaining wages and careers. We want them to find those pathways with ease. You should invest in coaching and peer supports like we're able to achieve by creating cohort specific sections of gateway courses like math and English, which have a strong correlation to student momentum and their ultimately success. You should cultivate partnerships that secure grants and private funding to extend your organization’s fiscal capacity to serve your students. And as you make facility improvements look to design and integrate family friendly spaces throughout your campuses, including common learning spaces where students can collaborate and connect.
00:19:46 Susan Looney
Absolutely agree 1000% and you mentioned, as you first started in your response, that this is really new conversation. Like you said, we really weren't in, you know, in the world of Community colleges or even higher education overall, the concept of focusing on student parents that, this is really a ,this is really a new focus. What role does higher education play in enhancing or altering the conversation of diversity and inclusion on individual campuses?
00:20:23 DeAnna Burt-Nanna
Yes, you know when public access to higher education was broadened after World War Two, it was with the intent, you know, this Susan, to equalize the playing field between the haves and the have nots. Higher education was no longer to be only for select few, but instead for the masses to access. But as we know, the masses are not a homogeneous group of learners. They come to us with diverse needs and abilities, but all of them come to us with hopes and dreams of a better life for themselves and their loved ones. They all want life to be better, and this very desire, for better is codified in the Declaration of Independence, where all citizens we have inherent rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This is where higher education fits in, and especially our nation’s community colleges with our Open Access missions, we are the community’s colleges for all people across all zip codes of our communities. Higher education is a place where we build upon and expand students’ abilities to think critically about themselves and the world around them. Not in a cocoon, but in the company of an eclectic group of people who look and eat and dress and believe and think differently. We understand this at Monroe and that is why I have made my priority as its 6th President to amplify our focus on belongingness in every aspect of our operation, and you'll see this memorialized in Vision 2027. That's our current strategic plan, which includes the college’s first ever diversity, equity and inclusion statement, and refreshed values statements. We also foster belongingness by maintaining a firm commitment to civil discourse through open discussions and freedom of expression within the expectations of our code of conduct, which applies to everyone, all employees, and all of our students.
00:22:52 Susan Looney
Absolutely. What you just said, I'm just shaking my head smiling because there's so much in that beautifully said response. And thank you. And I couldn't agree with you more. Final question, what do you hope that the impact is upon your students from your institutions efforts on diversity, equity and inclusion?
00:23:17 DeAnna Burt-Nanna
Susan, I want every student and every employee of Monroe Community College to know they belong and experience that belonging in every interaction that we all have together at our college. I just mentioned Vision 2027. That's our strategic plan. And in the first strategic direction of that plan, it lists within there that we will function together as one. So what does that mean to us? It means MCC students, faculty, staff, trustees, retirees and alumni serve as ambassadors to meet the needs of our communities and create solutions. We will work intentionally as one institution off our campuses and sites and as a unit of the State University of New York or SUNY. So at Monroe, we will achieve this by everyone's actions working to move us closer and not in opposition to actualizing our priorities and values each day.
00:24:30 Susan Looney
Well, well said and thank you so much, President Burt-Nanna, for sharing your work with our listeners. To our listeners, thank you for joining us. It has really been a pleasure, and I am truly inspired by the work you were doing at Monroe. Again, DeAnna, thank you so much for your time today. We really appreciate all that you do and the amazing hope and belonging that you've just highlighted that is so important to all of us on all of our campuses. So I really do appreciate your time. If you would like the Commission to highlight the efforts of your institution in a future podcast, please visit MSCHE dot org slash pillars of change to submit your suggestions. On behalf of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and our guest President Burt-Nanna, I’m Susan Looney, saying thank you.