Center helps parents cope with child care

The fluttering leaves of tall crape myrtles form a cooling canopy over the grounds of the SAGE child-care center in the Nickerson Gardens public housing project in South Los Angeles. With its thick green lawn, large sand-bottomed playground and tidy bungalows, the place is an oasis of safety and productive engagement for the project’s children.

It also is a godsend to parents and guardians, freeing them from child-care worries so they can work or go to school.

A case in point: Carleen Ward, 49, is the mother of four grown children and the grandmother of two, with three more on the way. Among SAGE staffers, she is known for her exceptional strength and kindliness.

Since her marriage at age 18, her life has been about raising children -- her own and half a dozen born to relatives who proved unable to raise them. She lives with her 8-year-old grandnephew, Dion, whom she adopted from a drug-addicted niece, and 7-year-old granddaughter, Paige, who suffers from sickle cell anemia and whose single mother works nights as a city services telephone operator.

Both children attend after-school programs at SAGE, where, in addition to supervised play, they engage in academic enhancement projects, such as computer learning and physical science experiments. SAGE, which has a staff of 10, also offers full-day preschool to younger children.

In all, 77 children are enrolled there. “Dion and Paige love it there,” Ward said. “They hate when it’s time to go home and eat.”

Because of SAGE (the word is not an acronym), Ward has been able to pursue a long-postponed goal: learning to read.

She attends literacy classes four hours a day at the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Maxine Waters Employment Preparation Center, and receives two hours of tutoring daily.

“I always wanted to know how to read,” she said. “I went to school, but I never learned to read, and they just kept promoting me, all the way to 12th grade. I could teach the kids their little ABCs, but I couldn’t go much further than that.”

People who know her say Ward is a natural candidate to open a day-care center of her own. First, however, she has to improve her reading so she can pass the state licensing examination.

In the meantime, SAGE has “given me the opportunity to go to school and allows me to care for Paige when she gets sick. They don’t pressure you. They’re very understanding.”

Since opening in 1994, SAGE director Cathy Tate said, the center has become an integral part of the community at Nickerson Gardens.

Most project residents have or have had family members who have benefited from the center. Vandalism and graffiti have been minimal problems.

The center’s bungalows are kept well-painted and clean but are showing their age as the bottoms of exterior walls have become frayed.

SAGE staffers hope that a capital improvement project or building fund will be in the center’s near future.

The child-care center is an operation of Crystal Stairs Inc., one of the state’s largest nonprofit child-care development, research and advocacy agencies.

Founded in 1980 by former UCLA professor Karen Hill-Scott and Alice Walker Duff, a children’s advocate and early member of the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission, it took its name from a line in a Langston Hughes poem.

It is funded by federal grants and state grants, and corporate and individual donations.

This year, Crystal Stairs received a $15,000 grant from the annual Times Holiday Campaign, which is part of the Los Angeles Times Family Fund, a fund of the McCormick Tribune Foundation.

This year the fund will match every dollar raised at 50 cents on the dollar.

Donations are tax-deductible. For more information, call (213) 237-5771.

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james.ricci@latimes.com