For six months, Serina Quast had what she called the perfect child care situation.

Quast, 24, a married full-time student at Portland Community College's Rock Creek Campus, would start her day by walking with her son, Theo, who was 3 at the time, to a bus stop about 20 feet from their home. They'd get on the bus at 6 a.m., ride for half an hour to the campus on Northwest Springville Road, near the Bethany area of Washington County, then walk across campus to the Rock Creek Child Development Center in Building 3.

And Quast wasn't just dropping off her son with enough time to get to her first class at 7:30 a.m. - she was leaving Theo at a place where he was excited to go.

"It was just an amazing program," said Quast, the parenting group chair at PCC Rock Creek. The center's staff took an interest in her as well, she said, always taking the time to ask how she was doing. "It was really just an amazing program that I never thought I could have access to."

But on June 20, 2014, the center, which had been an experiment in providing high-quality early childhood education, closed. Sandra Fowler-Hill, Rock Creek campus president, wrote in a letter to families using the center that it was costing about $150,000 to provide care for 15 children. She wrote, "Space limitations at the campus prohibit us from accepting additional children and a district-wide decrease in enrollment have combined to create a funding deficit the College cannot absorb."

Now Quast and her son get on the bus, ride to the stop nearest his current child care provider, and walk half a mile. After dropping off Theo, Quast takes two buses to Rock Creek. The trip is two and a half hours.

"I was in the perfect position. It was really easy," Quast said. "And now - a nightmare."

Community colleges are not required to provide on-campus care for their students' children. In fact, the number of community colleges that provide child care has been declining: Catherine Hill, vice president of research for the American Association of University Women, said fewer than half of community colleges now provide child care, even though about 25 percent of all undergraduate students in the U.S. are parents of young children, and about half of those students are single parents. Where child care still exists, it's often provided by a contractor. Mt. Hood Community College got out of the child care business in 2010, when it turned over its child care facility to a Head Start program that was already operating on campus. At Clackamas Community College in Oregon City, the YMCA and Head Start run the campus child care center.

But PCC raised many students' hopes when it placed a $374 million bond measure before voters in 2008 that proposed, among other things, expanding students' child care facilities. An Oct. 27, 2008, article in the Daily Journal of Commerce reported that the list of PCC bond projects included a $1.9 million child care facility at Rock Creek.

The bond passed the following month with 63 percent of the vote.

Since then, PCC has added a new 5,000-square-foot child care center, run by Albina Head Start, to its Cascade campus in North Portland. PCC is also planning a child care facility at its Southeast Portland campus, which it built with the bond, and has solicited child care providers to lease the facility. But current bond materials say nothing about a Rock Creek child care facility.

Gina Whitehill-Baziuk, who oversees the PCC bond, said the omission doesn't mean the college has decided against providing child care at Rock Creek. She said the Rock Creek Child Development Center was closed because it was too small and because it was in a "very bad location" where the children's outdoor play was disturbing others and where expansion wasn't possible.

"There was never any intent to not come up with some other solution," Whitehill-Baziuk said. "The campus and the college and the bond program are collectively going to move forward to find a different location and to potentially either find an existing location within an existing structure or potentially build another structure."

But reconstruction of Rock Creek's Building 5 has put planning for a new child care facility on hold, she said.

In the meantime, students who were using the Rock Creek Child Development Center were told they could transfer their children to either the YMCA's Amberglen Child Development Center in Hillsboro, 3 miles away, or the child development center at PCC's Sylvania Campus in Southwest Portland, 14 miles away.

"They weren't left without a choice," Whitehill-Baziuk said.

That's not how Sydney Howell of Forest Grove, a 47-year-old mother of five who is enrolled at PCC Rock Creek, sees it.

Howell, who looked into the closure of the Rock Creek child care center for a class project in a women's studies course, said PCC is reneging on the promise it made in the 2008 bond measure. Furthermore, she said, if PCC truly cared about its students' success, it would prioritize high-quality, stable child care for students' children.

"Child care is the number-one obstacle to students that are parents," she said, citing research from the Institute for Women's Policy Research that found a majority of community college students said they would not have been able to continue their education without child care. Providing high-quality child care "lets children know that they're important, that their education is an investment, just as much as the parents' education is important," Howell said.

To add insult to injury, Howell and Quast said, parents with children at the center were notified of its closure by email after its last day of operations and on the day before the start of summer term. Quast had to rearrange her class schedule at the last minute. And she said she's since talked to some parents who still don't realize the center is closed: They're arranging their classes in anticipation of their children turning 3 and finally becoming eligible to enroll there.

Howell sent an eight-page letter of complaint in February to Fowler-Hill, the Rock Creek campus president, about the closure of the center, which left the campus of nearly 25,000 students without any onsite child care.

The letter asked for "full reinstatement of previously instituted essential child care services." It said the closure particularly affected low-income students receiving assistance from the federal CCAMPIS (Child Care Access Means Parents In School) program, which has awarded grants totaling more than $1.5 million to PCC since fiscal 2005. The college distributes the CCAMPIS funds to qualifying students.

Simone Chaves, director of the current four-year CCAMPIS grant and interim director of the PCC-Sylvania child development center, said at the time of the Rock Creek center's closure, eight of its 16 slots were occupied by the children of CCAMPIS students. The college worked to find similar-quality providers where those children could and did transfer, Chaves said.

This month, Howell and Quast met with Fowler-Hill as well as with Narce Rodriguez, dean of student development at Rock Creek, and Kristen Martin, coordinator of the Women's Resource Center at Rock Creek, to air their concerns and ask for a solution. Howell said afterward she felt the meeting hadn't been productive.

"We spent a lot of time arguing back and forth over different positions instead of looking for solutions," she said. "I don't feel PCC is offering any solutions to the students in any way, shape or form."

Quast said her faith in the college has been shaken.

"When PCC's talking about retention and diversity and inclusion, I look at this and I wonder, how could they argue that they support these things?" she said. "What would be inclusive of families is if parents were actually able to attend school because they had child care on campus."

She and Howell cited a survey Quast did at Rock Creek in which she asked 236 students whether they believed that students should have access to child care on campus and whether they would be willing to pay extra student activity fees to fund a child care center on campus, if necessary. About 36 percent of those surveyed said they had children.

The results, according to a spreadsheet Quast compiled, showed that 97 percent of those surveyed were in favor of child care on campus and that 79 percent would be willing to pay more student activity fees to support the service. The survey didn't ask students to specify how much more they'd be willing to pay.

College officials say they're also highly supportive of child care on campus.

Chaves said students can apply for child care grants from the Student Activity Fund, which has fewer restrictions than the federal CCAMPIS grant, is more portable and pays an almost equivalent amount. She also said that regardless of what students might perceive, PCC is committed to expanding child care options.

"There's sometimes pieces that are hard when you don't see the whole picture," she said.

Fowler-Hill said Rock Creek had long offered evening child care to students before the previous campus administration decided to open the child development center as a pilot program in September 2013. By the time she arrived on campus last April, she said, Rodriguez and others were concerned about sustaining the center. Its funding had been coming from extra revenue - so-called margin money, which was disappearing as PCC's overall enrollment dropped. After sorting through the possibilities, Fowler-Hill said, she decided to close the center.

"We're exploring what options could be available and are very committed to seeing that we reinstate child care here," she said. "It really is an important support system that provides access for student-parents to return to school."

Fowler-Hill acknowledged that students weren't as well informed as they could have been about the Rock Creek Child Development Center and its closure.

"We could have done that better," she said. "It surprised students and they weren't aware of the pilot status ... they were assuming that this was a service that was going to be here for them for the long haul."

"Early learning is really essential for all of us and I'm committed to supporting an early learning program here at Rock Creek," she said. "How we make that happen and how we make it sustainable are the challenges that we're all working together to try to figure out."

-- Amy Wang

awang@oregonian.com

503-294-5914

@ORAmyW