Student Perspective: A Reflection on Parenting Students Month
2025-2026 Vice Chair Javi Morrison-Galimore led the charge on Parent Priority Registration at the Minnesota State Legislature. The bill, HF 4252, created some of the strongest protections for pregnant and parenting students in the country. In this blog, Javi describes her experience as a student parent, and as a policy leader here in Minnesota.
Long before I had the language of policy to describe the experience of being a student parent, I was already living the consequences of systems that had not fully accounted for students like me.
Having a child postponed my return to higher education by a couple of years, but when I returned to the classroom, I came back even more ambitious, pursuing a double major in Cybersecurity and Political Science and determined to make the most of my education.
I learned to make several parts of my life move in tandem as I managed coursework, while taking on internships, statewide student governance, mentorship, and community service.
Choosing a class time was never about whether I preferred mornings or afternoons. If the section that worked with caregiving filled before I could register, that could mean delaying a required course, rearranging childcare, changing my work schedule, or reconsidering another commitment.
And that reality gave me a different understanding of basic needs.
Transportation, employment, finances, housing, food security, childcare, and access to information were interconnected. A disruption in one could quickly destabilize several others.
My work with Students United gave me an opportunity to see that experience beyond the boundaries of my own campus.
As the 2025-2026 Vice Chair, I had the privilege of seeing Minnesota higher education from a statewide perspective. During our annual visits to campuses across the state, I paid attention to how different universities supported parenting students, from support centers and grants to emergency stabilization funding and basic-needs resources. But I also saw glaring gaps: students not knowing who their campus parent navigators were, a lack of awareness of available resources, and other barriers that compounded the difficulty.
It became clear that support was not experienced consistently.
I put into writing what I believed would help solve these gaps. This included proactive priority registration, better data collection, institutional protections, and better identification of student-parent needs. Recognizing that informal accommodations and goodwill could never substitute for statewide policy.
During Students United’s Lobby Day at the State Capitol, I joined other student advocates in meeting directly with legislators, including Senator Clare Oumou Verbeten. I later returned for Student Parent Day with the Minnesota Office of Higher Education, bringing more than one hundred letters from parenting students describing the barriers they encountered, the support that made a difference, and the changes they believed would make higher education more navigable.
We heard from mothers studying for exams in hospital rooms while caring for sick toddlers. We heard from parents forced to choose between dropping a prerequisite or leaving their child without care.
When we give parenting students the predictability to balance their education alongside their families, we help shape individual graduation timelines and the educational trajectories of generations. Priority registration and statutory protections are low-cost, high-impact measures that create predictability and with it, opportunity.
