Irvine Taking Steps to Ease the Shortage of Quality Day Care

Rudi Berkelhamer lives in Irvine with her husband, four children, a foreign-exchange student, a dog, a cat and a career.

On weekday mornings, she and her husband are up at 6 to feed their infant son. By 7:45, their 17-year-old twin daughters and the teen-age foreign student are off to school. Her husband leaves 15 minutes later, taking their 3-year-old daughter to preschool on his way to work. She leaves at 8:30, drops off the baby at a day-care facility and gets to work about 9.

“I wouldn’t feel comfortable working without reliable day care,” said Berkelhamer, 38, who lectures on biology lecturer at UC Irvine. “Having reliable day care is what makes it all work.”

Berkelhamer is lucky: First, she’s managed to secure the child care she needs, even though she had to sign up 2 1/2 years in advance to get her 3-year-old into preschool. And, she lives in Irvine, one of the first cities in California to tackle its child-care shortage aggressively, making it a top city priority and hiring staff to promote the economical, quality programs.

Work Bearing Fruit

In the past three months, five years of work by Irvine residents and city officials has at last begun to bear fruit.

Since November, the city has:

- Hired a child-care coordinator to oversee public and private services.

- Started the “Irvine Child Care Project,” a program for finding ways to increase the availability of day care at schools.

- Appointed the “Joint Powers Authority,” an autonomous group of private citizens, school board members and city officials, to control the project.

- Bought six portable buildings to house child care at three public school sites, starting next month. (The city contributed $20,000 and the Irvine Co. pitched in another $250,000 so that 30 more buildings can be purchased in the next five years.) Two school sites have already been leased, and applications are being taken for the third.

- Organized a nine-day summer course, through Orange Coast College, to help family-home day-care operators upgrade their skills, and a free mini-course, to meet in April, to familiarize prospective home operators with the requirements of the system.

Irvine was the second city in California to hire a full-time supervisor for its child-care improvement efforts, according to Jean Nelson, a director at the International Child Resource Institute, Berkeley. She said San Francisco was the first, in January, 1984, and several other California city governments are developing partnerships with child-care services in an effort to meet their residents’ needs.

Irvine’s new child-care coordinator is Nancy Noble. She said the growing demand for child care came to the attention of Irvine city officials in 1979, as a result of concern over “latch key” children, who lack adult supervision after school.

City-Commissioned Study

In 1981, the city spent $30,000 to commission a study. The consultants, Berkeley Planning Associates, reported that Irvine had child care available to only a fourth of the children who needed it in 1982, and if supply did not increase, only one child in six would be able to get proper care by 1988.

“Our need is to create more day care, and I mean all-day care,” Noble said. “All the time in a day care or preschool, the whole thing that’s happenning is the child is developing into a whole person, a person who will be a contributing member of society. It’s not just ‘let’s put these kids in a box and care for them.’ We must have quality programs.”

Child care comes in many forms, Noble said in an interview at her Irvine office. There are recreation programs for school-age children, preschools, facilities in homes, churches, schools, private corporations, hospitals and private centers. There are services exclusively for infants and toddlers, and there are nannies and other types of “in-home” care.

To promote quality in all these services, she said, the city plans a “Center Startup and Quality Program” for developing a peer-review system.

Baby Services Lacking

“Infant and school-age child care are our most pressing needs,” Noble said. Currently in Irvine, there are only two infant-toddler centers and a handful of after-school recreation programs for school-age children.

“School-age child care programs are, in part, recreation programs,” Noble said. “(Children) don’t need to be in a school-type program all the time. They need time to play and dream and create.”

Noble, 53, is a professional in the child-development field who feels strongly about good child care. After directing the Orange Coast College Child Development Center, Costa Mesa, for 12 years, she took a year’s leave to lend her expertise to Irvine.

“Things are just really popping!” she said proudly. “There are a lot of creative people in Irvine, and the creative juices have just begun to flow.”

Other projects under way, Noble said, include a nonprofit fund-raising organization and a “phone friend hot line” for children who are home alone after school. Latch-key children could call the special number if they need help or are just lonely, she said. The American Assn. of University Women, in State College, Pa., and Chatters, in Houston, Tex., offer such support services.

Although most of the Irvine’s projects are still in the planning, the actions taken so far have cost relatively little money, said Child Care Committee member Betsy Mathis.

Spending Outlined

Mathis, a social policy research consultant, said the city has spent $134,000 in the last 5 years ($30,000 for the Berkeley Planning Assn. study, $84,000 for the child-care coordinator and her staff, and $20,000 for the portable buildings).

“The philosophy of the community is that no one sector--schools, business, city--no one can do this whole job by themselves,” she said. “The city has been the entity that’s provided momentum with its Child Care Committee. It can do its part. It can facilitate stuff--that’s a real legitimate role.”

Irvine is in a “tremendous growth mode,” Mathis said, with a population of 80,000 that is expected to nearly triple, to 220,000, by the year 2000.

City ‘Will Provide Support’

“It’s a situation that’s not going to get better in a town where people are supposed to live and work,” Mathis said. “I think the exciting part of being in Irvine is that it is accepting of initiatives. If you have a well-thought-out approach and have done your homework, the city will provide the support that will allow it to keep going.”

Economy in money, space and manpower is critical to the program’s success, committee members say. If the supply of child care is to be permanently improved, the city must look at private-sector involvement and bond programs to raise money, said City Councilman Barbara Weiner.

“Over the next 10 years, we are planning to obtain additional private funds of approximately $40,000 a year,” she said. “I think that we are really moving, and there are other resources in the community that we need to tap. We’re trying to use the resources that we have. I think the Irvine Child Care Project is a good demonstration of that, and I think Nancy (Noble) is a good demonstration of that. We think these techniques can be used in other cities.”

One resource Irvine particularly wants to tap is day care offered in private homes by licensed operators.

“In the past, not too many people have come out for family day care,” said Wendy Perry, an Irvine Child Care Committee member and the former president of the Orange County Family Day Care Assn.

“We were the quiet minority. I want to make us the noisy majority,” she said. “Family home day care has very little impact on the city, as far as money goes.”

Noble agreed, saying Irvine has 84 such homes, but once had more than 90.

“I want to expand family day care because I see that as a place for our babies,” she said, referring to the city’s need for infant-toddler care. She emphasized, however, that quality is more important than quantity.

Perry added that parental involvement is the key to quality day care.

“Parents need to be out there,” she said. “If they have something that they question in the home, they should confront the provider.”