Supporting Student Parents in the Academic Library

Student parents are a socioeconomically, racially, and financially diverse group. What they have in common is the drive to work hard to overcome steep barriers in obtaining a college education.
 
Supporting Student Parents in the Academic Library: Designing Spaces, Policies, and Services is part toolkit, part treatise, and part call to action. In four parts:

• The Higher Education Landscape
• The Role of Academic Libraries
• Looking Outward to Community, For-Profit, and International Organizations
• Evaluating Needs and Measuring Success 

It includes templates, sample policy language, budgets, survey instruments, and other immediately useful tools and examples. There are field notes from academic librarians from institutions of varying sizes and resources demonstrating different ways of supporting these students, and the voices of students themselves.
 
Student parents can feel unwelcome and invisible in their institutions. And for every student parent who is struggling to complete an education despite these hurdles, there are many others who have not been able to find a way. Supporting Student Parents is a guide to engaging with and aiding the student parents in your libraries and leading the charge in making your institutions more family friendly.