Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Child care center approach should have been taken before cuts were announced

Missouri Southern State University officials have backed down on their plan to shut down the Child Development Center, a plan that supposedly was hatched solely from the mind of University President Dr. Bruce Speck:

Parents’ requests and their willingness to pay more prompted the university to find a way to keep the Child Development Center operating, said President Bruce Speck. The operation serves as a day-care center and provides field experience for education students.

Now, parents will pay $26 a day instead of $23, and the center will accept about double the number of children each day that it has been accommodating. The changes will allow the center to sustain itself monetarily.

“This has gone from being budget-negative to budget-neutral,” Speck said. “Given the number of children the center will have and the increase in fees, it should be able to support itself.”


Real leadership would have found this way to save the program before making the cut in the first place. There is nothing in the plan that was announced Tuesday that could not have been accomplished if the effort had been made earlier.

Apparently, a good method for dealing with Dr. Bruce Speck and the powers-that-be at Missouri Southern State University is inundate them with bad publicity. That forces them to do some actual thinking about how to save programs rather than simply take the easy way out and take the ax to them.

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous7:23 AM

    Nothing is hatched from Bruce's mind. It all comes either from Agee or Douglas (partners in crime). Never a peep from the other governors. Nodler sure chose them right for you, didn't he, Douglas? But you are right, Randy. This presumed crisis could have been prevented with a little bit of enlightened leadership. In their effort to paint a dire financial crisis at the university, Agee, Douglas and Speck got giddy with excitement from seeing the college faculty totally scared to death... Never a peep from them either...

    ReplyDelete