Program Description
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has created a number of pressing challenges for working families within the OSU community. Several area daycares have closed and others are operating at reduced capacity. Families with school-aged children continue to face uncertainty with respect to the resumption plans for the 2020-21 school year.
In response to these concerns, the College of Liberal Arts, with the help of strategic institutional partners, is organizing a temporary child care option that activates one of our greatest assets: OSU students.
This program aims to recruit a pool of undergraduate students interested in providing child care and educational services to faculty and staff for winter term 2021. In addition to receiving wages, we hope to enable students pursuing degrees in early childhood education and related fields to enroll in internship or practicum credits.
Students can provide basic child care services or offer specialized educational enrichment in areas such as art and music, second languages, sports, and subject tutoring. The goal is to help meet the needs of OSU working families while simultaneously allowing students to flex their talents while gaining practical work experience.
This program utilizes the university’s existing subscription with care.com that provides no-cost memberships to all OSU employees and students. Care.com is an external, web-based marketplace that enables care seekers and care providers to post profiles and communicate on its platform. Care.com independently offers a number of resources and tools for matching care providers and hiring families, including options to search by zip code and by university affiliation. This program further optimizes the search process for hiring families by generating a list of OSU students interested in providing services in the local community. Families seeking care will request to receive the list of participants as an additional tool for the search and hiring process through care.com. Please note that student participants who appear on the list are not university employees. As such, these participants are not subject to university policy and procedures and are not endorsed, nor vetted by the university. Hiring families and students should utilize the resources and tools available through Care.com for guiding the search and hiring process. Care.com provides its own options for conducting background and reference checks, as well as a suite of safety resources for care seekers and care providers. All decisions related to hiring, pay, and work protocols will be negotiated independently between students and hiring families using the communication options provided through care.com.