Downtown Child Care for Middle Class Scheduled

The first child care facility for children of middle-class parents working in downtown Los Angeles will open in mid-April, a consortium of downtown public and private employers announced Thursday.

The Children’s Learning Center of the First United Methodist Church at 1010 S. Flower St. is the first of four such-planned centers by the Alliance of Businesses for Childcare Development.

A nonprofit group founded by the United Way in 1985 to address downtown child care needs, the alliance is part of a developing local and state trend toward partnerships between local governments, voluntary agencies and the private sector to meet the demand for child care.

State Department of Education officials estimate that demand exceeds supply of space in child care facilities statewide by 800,000. A recent study by Crystal Stairs, an Inglewood child development agency, showed a shortage of 263,812 spaces in Los Angeles County, a figure that includes a shortage of 87,437 spaces in the City of Los Angeles.

In downtown Los Angeles alone, a 1984 United Way study of 5,000 downtown employees found that parents of 2,500 pre-school-age children needed child care near their place of work.

There is little in the way of child care available downtown, and what does exist is primarily geared to low-income families. There are four facilities currently supplying care to 522 children, including Para Los Ninos, the Salvation Army and two in Chinatown. Fees are charged on a sliding scale according to income. Most of the children at Para Los Ninos, according to a spokeswoman, attend without charge.

“We’re supplying something that isn’t there,” said Allan K. Jonas, a developer and chairman of the alliance’s board of directors, of the new downtown center. “One of the big mistakes is to declare child care a woman’s problem or a welfare problem. It isn’t either. It’s a community problem.”

The new facility will charge $90 a week for infants and $75 a week for children ages 2 to 5. The 70 spaces available will be filled on a “first-come, first-serve” basis, with the first opportunity at enrollment for employees of companies and agencies that have supported or contributed to the alliance.

These include Bullock’s, Transamerica Life Cos., Security Pacific National Bank, Southern California Gas Co., Times Mirror Co. and the City of Los Angeles.

The consortium, using a $500,000 loan from United Way--and a planned $2-million fund-raising drive this year--pays to develop sites for child care, according to alliance executive director Gretchen Anderson, and then turns over the actual child care management to another nonprofit provider. Parent fees are then expected to sustain the operating costs.

The alliance did not initially develop the Children’s Learning Center but assisted the First United Methodist Church with an $82,000 donation.

A second site, costing $550,000, is planned for 80 to 100 pre-schoolers at 965 Venice Blvd., Anderson said. A $650,000 facility for 80 to 100 children is planned at 1201 S. Hope St., while a fourth site in the Bunker Hill area is still under negotiation.

A similar facility is in operation in Burbank, and another in Woodland Hills will open in September.

The consortia have come about because of the high costs of developing child care facilities, Anderson said.

“This is the kind of partnership needed,” she noted. “Real estate is too expensive, along with the costs of renovation, setting up equipment and establishing a program. There isn’t any one organization, whether it’s a private corporation or public sector agency, that’s able to do it all.”