Chancellor James Oblinger and other University leaders discussed on-campus childcare for students, enrollment and growth, distance education and safety alerts during Wednesday’s Chancellor’s Liaison Meeting.

Barbara Carroll, Associate Vice Chancellor for Human Resources, said the human resources office is asking child care facilities in Raleigh and Cary to give students discounts.

She also discussed the possibility of a University-owned child care center.

“When it comes to a child care center, we looked to see if there was enough need to build one, and the preliminary information said ‘yes,'” Carroll said. “Now we’re trying to get a sense of how to fund the project.”

Carroll also added that the funding for the $5 million child care center will not be taken from student fees, so they are looking to see if there are “prospective donors that would like a building named after them. So far there have been none.”

“There’s no timeline, so we’ll have to find creative ways to fund it,” Carroll said.

David Rainer, associate vice chancellor of Environmental Health and Public Safety, reported the recent performance of the University’s new emergency text message system. He said that 80 percent of the text messages from the test were sent within 16 minutes. He also said that the time in which people received texts depended on the cell phone providers.

“[The test] was fairly successful. We sent 12,000 text messages, and over 1,000 people enrolled after the incident [at Northern Illinois University],” Rainer said.

Rainer added that the University will also conduct another test of the emergency text message system in August because “there will be a bunch of new students and we will encourage them to enroll.”

Karen Helm, director of University Planning and Analysis, discussed the expected growth in the University. According to University Planning and Analysis, the UNC system is expecting a 37 percent increase from 2007 to 2017.

“The demand for space in the UNC system is expected to expand increasingly,” Helm said. “The number of second, third, fourth and fifth graders is growing.”

According to Helm, N.C. State plans to have 40,000 students enrolled by 2017.

Helm said that a “branch campus is a way to deal with the growing number of students.”

Helm and Oblinger stressed the importance of growth in the University and not lowering standards for applicants.

“We don’t want to grow so quickly and degrade the quality of education,” Helm said. “If we stopped growing, then we would not get any more resources than we do now…No one wants to grow if the quality can’t grow also.”

Oblinger said the projections for the amount of students that would attend State was reliable according to past experiences.

“The projections have been pretty accurate in the past… being within 500 of the projection,” Oblinger said.