Dear President McDonough and members of the RVCC Board of Trustees,

We strongly urge you to reconsider the decision to close the Children’s Campus. Such a move would devastate our community.

The Children’s Campus serves a diverse population of students, faculty, staff, and community members by providing a safe, high-quality pre-school education for our students, staff and community. Attending the Children’s Campus instills curiosity and fosters a life-long appreciation of learning in the children it serves, and supports the parents of those children as well, many of whom are students, staff, and faculty at the College. Exposing young children to this diverse, inclusive, and caring environment on our college campus lays the foundation for their appreciation of the value of education.

It is particularly harmful, bordering on cruel, to students, faculty, staff, and community families to close the Children’s Campus in the midst of this pandemic. It risks trauma for our young children as they are taken away from where they belong -- a place that has managed to keep them safe and well during a very turbulent time. Working parents will be forced to choose between dropping out of the workforce or securing a seat in scarce childcare facilities that are likely to be significantly more expensive and may not match the Children’s Campus’ curriculum that emphasizes developmentally appropriate learning. In fact, a recent survey conducted in NJ indicated that since the start of the pandemic, more than 1 in 10 parents reported having to leave the workforce to manage childcare, and of those parents, women were impacted 6 times more than men. In addition, the childcare shortage has had a devastating effect on communities of color, with nearly half of the families surveyed indicating that their childcare costs have significantly increased since the pandemic began.

We cannot let the RVCC Children’s Campus become yet another casualty of this pandemic. It must remain open.

We urge you to find a way to sustain the RVCC Children’s Campus so that it can maintain the essential role it has provided to our community for more than forty years.