Child-Care Centers: State Fund Limits Pose Threat

Outside the Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters last week, 7-year-old Oscar Arrevalo stood among about 150 parents and their children protesting pending cuts in the district’s children’s centers, which provide day care for 10,500 low-income children.

“We are afraid,” Oscar translated from Spanish for his mother, Dolores, who leaves her son at the Wilton Place Elementary School child-care center in the mid-Wilshire area every weekday from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., while she works as a cleaning woman.

For four years, the self-possessed, dark-eyed little boy has attended the center, he said; without it to care for her children, his mother would not be able to keep her job.

Inside the school headquarters, Superintendent Harry Handler was warning the school board that a projected $2.6-million deficit in the state funded child-care program may force the district to cut back on the care it provides children like Oscar.

Handler suggested a “partial solution, for one year only”: Leave 400 spaces for children unfilled, terminate 20 teachers and 60 aides. That would mean, for the time being, at least, no children currently enrolled in the centers would have to leave and none of the district’s 90 centers would close.

But the future does not look bright. Like a growing number of school districts around the state, Los Angeles is facing the prospect of making drastic cuts in child care for low-income children.

In the weeks since Gov. George Deukmejian signed the $37-billion state budget in June and reduced the cost-of-living adjustment for child-development programs to 1%, administrators of the state’s 2,100 children’s center programs have been scrambling to avoid budget deficits that could spell cuts in services and even closure.

“About a dozen” programs around the state will eventually close this year, predicted Robert Cervantes, assistant superintendent of the State Department of Education’s child-development division, which funds child-care services for about 60,000 low-income children.

One Already Closed

At least one Southern California program--a Riverside County program serving 36 low-income children--has already closed. Administrators of other children’s centers say they can survive this year, but worry about closing next year.

The full effect of the current budget squeeze will not be known for months, Cervantes said, but he predicted the situation will have “devastating consequences,” as closures add thousands more children to a child-care system that already has severe shortages. He estimated the statewide shortage at 800,000 to 1 million spaces.

“The 1% (cost-of-living adjustment) can’t maintain these programs . . . and there’s nowhere else for these people to go,” Cervantes added.

That issue already has local parents worried. “I work as a maid in a hotel,” said Edith Guerrero of Los Angeles, who has two children in child-care centers. “I have no husband and I have to work. The hotel can’t baby-sit.”

Children’s center programs date back to World War II, when school districts began providing infant, preschool and after-school care so that mothers could work to help the war effort.

Low-Income Families

Now such programs receive most of the state’s $302-million child-development budget, serving children of parents whose incomes are close to poverty level. Fees are set according to ability to pay, from zero up to $18 a day.

“We’re not talking about people sitting around home wondering if their children need social skills,” said Los Angeles school board member Jackie Goldberg. “The bulk of our program is for abused and neglected children, children of single parents who are in school so they can finally support their kids, or who are working full time.

“These are people for whom child care is the difference between survival or not,” she said.

Elsewhere around the state, school districts are experiencing shortfalls similar to Los Angeles’ problem. Administrators at San Francisco Unified, which serves 4,100, say they face a $400,000 deficit even before teacher salary increases are added in. In Oakland, the 2,060-child program faces a $500,000 shortfall.

Most school officials say they have been cutting staff, consolidating jobs or replacing full-time instructional aides with part-timers to save the cost of job benefits. Some are hoping for bail-outs from local funds or charitable sources.

Continuing a Pattern

The dilemma reached crisis proportions this year because it followed a pattern of small cost-of-living increases over the last five years. Starting in the 1981-82 fiscal year, the increases to child-care teachers began to lag one or two percentage points behind increases granted elementary and high school teachers. Because of that, Cervantes said, “In the last two years we have lost 4,300 spaces” for students.

Now, for the current 1986-87 fiscal year, Deukmejian approved a 5.49% increase for general education, compared to the 1% for child-care teachers.

The problem is magnified because teacher salary increases negotiated by local unions often exceed the state increases, forcing school districts to make up the difference to pay their child-care professionals, or cut back services.

In Long Beach, for example, “Our child-development teachers were granted the same pay increases as K-12 unit teachers, approximately a 7% increase,” noted Carl Martin, child-development director for Long Beach Unified, which serves 1,700 children in its child-care program.

“So you can see what happens to my budget with a 1% increase,” Martin said. He does not yet know what kind of shortfall the district will face, but “We’re in a very precarious position,” he said.

Future Funding Unclear

Several school districts, such as Los Angeles, Inglewood and Pasadena, do not yet know what their teacher salary increases will be. Last year, however, Pasadena teachers received 10% increases, Inglewood 9% and Los Angeles 7%--all above the amount allocated for raises by the state.

Past deficits in Los Angeles, Goldberg said, were covered by reserve funds left over from pre-Proposition 13 days, but this money has now been spent.

Consequently, the child-care cuts announced last week are just “the tip of the iceberg,” she noted, “because now every time the (state increase) is less than raises or less than it costs to buy materials or equipment, it means direct program cuts, period.”

The $2.6-million deficit could grow even bigger, she added, when salary contracts are negotiated in September.

Some parents say they are worried that the small increases for child-care professionals reflect state officials’ feelings that child care is not considered “important.”

Charge Against Governor

“He (the governor) could make cuts in programs other than child care,” said Gloria Nazarian, a typist who has four children enrolled at a center in Silver Lake. “He is committing political child abuse because children don’t matter.”

But state officials deny that. Child care was not “singled out” for smaller cost-of-living raises, said State Department of Finance principal budget analyst Bill Borden.

“The governor was faced with using the budget resources first to provide for what was required under law,” he said. Cost-of-living increases for elementary and high school teachers are mandated by law, for example, but not required at all for child-development personnel.

Efforts to change the law to require increases for child-care workers have not been successful. Deukmejian this year vetoed a bill by state Sen. Herschel Rosenthal (D-Los Angeles) that would have mandated a child-care increase equal to that for teachers of kindergarten through 12th grade.

“There are options as to what children’s centers pay their teachers,” Borden added. “The real issue is prices, to the extent school districts pay their supervisors of child care too much. They may be opting to make program cuts rather than to keep wages down.”

High Cost Per Child

A Child Care Task Force appointed by the governor reported last year that the cost per child in state-subsidized programs at children’s centers, at $18, was about $3.50 more than “equivalent care in private child-care settings.”

Education officials say the higher salaries paid school district child-care personnel translate into higher quality care. “There is cheaper child care in the sense of being custodial care,” Cervantes said, “but you also don’t have the accountability factor you have in the state system.”

This week, Assemblyman Tom Bates (D-Oakland) attached an amendment to a bill currently before the Legislature to raise the child-care increase from 1% to 3.16% and add $6.1 million to the programs. It passed the Senate’s Budget and Fiscal Review Committee and now awaits a vote on the Senate floor.

Child-care advocates fear, however, that even if the Legislature passes the bill, it could also face the governor’s veto.

“They’re doing so much these days in fertility, making it possible to have more children,” Gloria Nazarian said, frustration in her voice. “But who is going to take care of these children if the family is not financially able?”