Camille RoquePena wants to help people, and to do this work in the future, she is planning to become a lawyer. Today, however, she’s a Strategies for Children intern and a student at Bunker Hill Community College. And she is researching innovative ways to support children and families by focusing on a population that tends to be overlooked by policymakers, student-parents.
Camille was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to the United States in 2008 with her mother, who had been diagnosed with cancer.
“My Mom and I struggled,” Camille recalls. “She was a hairdresser, and she didn’t make much money. I always wished that we had someone to talk to, someone to tell us how to do things, someone who was well-versed in law who could guide us through the very hard transition period of moving to America.”
Even without that guidance, however, Camille learned English and thrived at Boston Prep, one of the city’s charter schools. And people who could and did help began to show up in her life. Two high school teachers in particular—Mr. Blitzer and Mr. Dewey—were supportive mentors. Then, tragically, in 2021, a year after she graduated from high school, her mother passed away. That meant stepping away from school, finding new housing for herself and her grandparents, giving birth to her daughter, and working until she found her work back to school.
At Bunker Hill, Camille is earning an associate’s degree in Paralegal and Legal Studies. Next, she’ll earn her bachelor’s degree and then apply to law school. Among her mentors there is Professor Susan Atlas.
“She is my biggest motivation because she’s a single mom. She had four kids, and she was able to get through law school. So I’m, like, If she’s able to do it, I’m able to do it. She has opened the doors to a lot of opportunities for me. When I have had questions, she has answered them. When I’ve needed words of encouragement, she has been there.”
“I’m also very grateful for Strategies for Children. I’m very grateful to have met Titus,” Camille adds, referring to Titus DosRemedios, Strategies’ Deputy Director, “and I’m very grateful to have had the mentors that I’ve had in my life.”
As a Strategies intern, Camille is working on a number of projects, including an effort to advance child care support for students in higher education.
“Bunker Hill Community College has been amazing; they were able to grant me a private voucher for the child care center of my choice, and so now I’m trying to create a foundation that would help all the community colleges be able to work together to make sure that any student-parent in their schools can have either affordable or completely free child care, so essentially it would be a private child care voucher.”
As parents and early educators know, the need is considerable. Camille points to what can be the annual, $20,000 cost of child care in Massachusetts as well as the fact that an estimated one in four community college students are parents.
“I’m hoping that through this partnership, we could share resources among the community colleges, and maybe even expand by connecting with private institutions,” Camille says. “We have Emerson, Harvard, and Suffolk. Massachusetts is full of amazing colleges. It’s important that these colleges are able to communicate with each other and see if there are ways that they can help each other support student-parents.”
Camille credits Ann Reynolds of Wachusett Community College for pointing to Oregon’s efforts to better understand the size of its student-parent population. Oregon just passed a bill that will “allow students to identify whether they are parents or acting as parents or guardians on forms used annually to collect demographic information at public post-secondary education institutions, including community colleges and public universities,” according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, which adds:
“In addition to biological parents, this language was carefully crafted to include custodial grandparents, step-parents, sibling-caregivers, and others who are caring for children during college. The institutions will share the data with the state, and it will then be reported publicly.”
“As parents,” Camille says, “we want to do the best for our kids. We want to improve economically, but we can’t do that if we’re focused on finding adequate childcare and adequate education for our kids between the ages of zero to five years old.
“And it’s not just about helping parents, it’s about helping kids and improving the overall family dynamic. It’s really important to make sure that parents don’t feel overwhelmed. Children should feel like their parents are present.”
And that’s something, as Camille points out, that we can all help with.
Camille RoquePena is preparing a presentation of her findings and recommendations, and she will share more on The 9:30 Call on May 6th.