Warner Center Firms to Establish Child Care

Leaders of nine major Warner Center companies said Wednesday they will join together to set up their own day-care center for children of employees at the 90-acre Woodland Hills and Canoga Park industrial and office center.

The day-care center, scheduled to open in September, will be the first developed by San Fernando Valley private industry for its employees, according to the Child Care Resource Center of the San Fernando Valley, a state-funded referral service.

Member companies of the Warner Center Assn. will finance the center for as long as a year to get it running under its own momentum, said Robert D. Voit, chairman of the group.

Eventually, Voit said, the employees will be asked to pay some or all of the cost, which he estimated at about $200 a month per child.

That is on the low end of the cost of private day care in the Valley, which ranges from $200 to $400 a month, according to the child-care resource group.

The nine companies in the association employ about 15,800 workers, slightly less than half of the Warner Center’s total work force. About 70% of the employees at Warner Center are women.

Voit said development of the day-care center was one of several goals established when the association was formed in 1982.

The center will be set up on property rented from Pierce College. At first it will handle about 45 children, but it will be planned so that it can be expanded.

“It’s hard to know how many women will need it,” Voit said. “But there must be thousands. And there must be two or three thousand kids just in our Warner Center marketplace.”

Child care has become an increasingly thorny issue for companies with many female employees. Many firms have had difficulty recruiting or retaining women with young children--even though large numbers of such women have been forced into the labor market because of family expenses.

In the Valley, the result has been waiting lists for parents hoping to enroll their children at most of the 400 privately run, licensed preschools and day-care centers. Attendance has also been reported as heavy at 17 school-run day-care centers in Los Angeles and at five PTA-sponsored programs.

After-school recreational programs are also held on weekends at 126 school playgrounds in the Valley. The programs are informal and run for two hours.

The planned Warner Center program will resemble a Burbank day-care center organized last year by five companies in conjunction with the Burbank Unified School District and the City of Burbank. The facility’s 280 spaces are allocated on the basis of company or agency contribution to the program; the service costs parents about $65 a week.

Other companies at the Warner Center may eventually be able to join the child-care consortium. At first, the service will be available to employees of Blue Cross, Dataproducts, Kaiser Foundation Hospital, Litton Industries’ Guidance and Control Systems, P.L. Porter Co., Prudential Insurance, Rocketdyne, 20th Century Insurance and the Voit Companies.

The details of the day-care program are being worked out by a committee that includes experts from the Child Care Resource Center of the San Fernando Valley, Pierce College and California State University, Northridge. The two campuses already operate their own day-care centers for children of students and faculty.

Marjorie Morris, executive director of the Van Nuys-based resource center, said the cost of setting up such child-care facilities has scared off individual companies.

“They look at the price tag and they back off,” Morris said Wednesday. “That’s the benefit of shared expenses like they’re going to have in Warner Center.”

But Morris predicted that other company executives may soon be forced to make child care an employment benefit. “We know that, by 1990, more than 60% of the mothers of children under the age of 12 will be working.

“People are staggered by that statistic, but it’s a conservative one. The American dream is still for families to own their own home or at least rent one. And that can take two incomes now.”

Morris said there is a particularly pressing need for facilities to care for school-age children in the West Valley area after school and on holidays.

Virtually every child-care center that accommodates older children now has a waiting list, she said. About 75% of all the Valley’s preschools have similar enrollment backlogs--particularly in the north and northeast Valley.

“This is going to be a good recruiting tool for Warner Center employers,” she predicted.

The day-care plans were disclosed at an association breakfast meeting attended by Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, who was quick to laud the concept.

“In my judgment, there isn’t a more critical issue facing developers or employers in the city,” Bradley said.