by Peaches Chung

For parenting students, balancing coursework with employment and caregiving responsibilities often means navigating additional barriers to academic success. When child care arrangements fall through, even routine campus policies — such as restrictions on children in libraries and dining halls — can limit access to essential study spaces and resources.

Across the UC system, these challenges are part of many students’ daily experiences.

Schinal Harrington understands those realities firsthand.

A first-generation student in UCLA’s Master of Social Welfare program, Harrington is a proud double Bruin, chair of the Bruin Parenting Scholars at UCLA, and a leading voice for parenting students across the entire UC system.

“There is no individual dream in my journey,” Harrington reflects. “Higher education was a collective dream carried by my children, my ancestors, and the community that raised me. When I first arrived at UCLA, I carried more than books. I carried the lessons of survival and the knowledge of what it means to navigate systems that were never designed with students like me in mind.”

Harrington, a native of Santa Monica, was born at the UCLA hospital. As a child, she rode the Big Blue Bus her uncle drove to campus and admired the university from afar, never imagining she would one day call it home.

After earning dual bachelor’s degrees in Sociology and African American Studies, returning to UCLA for her MSW felt like both a homecoming and a calling.

“My path at Luskin is about transforming lived experience into leadership and ensuring institutions become accountable to the students and families they serve,” she says.

Balancing motherhood, scholarship and advocacy is not, in her view, a matter of juggling competing roles. Motherhood is the foundation for everything she does.

“Motherhood is the ground from which my scholarship and advocacy rise,” she says. “My studying happens in the margins of caregiving, in waiting rooms, in moments of uncertainty, and in the quiet after everyone else has been held, within systems that still ask parenting students to justify our presence. My family is not separate from my work. They are the reason for it.”

Harrington has been a vocal advocate for structural change: full-time CalWORKs coordinators, child-friendly study spaces, trauma-informed therapists and advisers, and reduced course-load options that do not punish parenting students through financial aid removal. She delivered powerful testimony before the UC Student Association Board of Directors, recounting the everyday challenges caregiving students face.

“Parenting students must fight for our basic needs,” she said.

Her advocacy contributed to the passage of the “Resolution Calling for Accountability, Compliance, and Structural Support for Parenting Students in the UC System” in November 2025, which was a milestone she describes as transformative.

“When the resolution was passed, our experiences moved from private hardship into public commitment,” she says. “Parenting students have always been here — capable, determined, exhausted, and too often unseen. Seeing student leadership formally recognize our realities affirmed that what we were carrying was not an individual burden, but an institutional one.”

After Luskin, Harrington plans to continue advancing equity in higher education and advocating for system-impacted communities, particularly youth impacted by the juvenile justice system. Her work, she says, will remain rooted in reducing harm, expanding dignity and ensuring those closest to the margins are driving the solutions.

In classrooms, policy rooms, and in testimony halls, Harrington is proving that parenting students are not anomalies within higher education — they are leaders within it. The institution she once watched from the window of a Big Blue Bus is now a place she is helping transform.