Child-Care Centers Struggling Under Restrictive Funding

Phyllis Levitt faces the same major dilemma each day she reports to work as executive director of Comprehensive Child Development Inc. in Long Beach.

“A sense of reality and proportion tells me to close,” she says. But she can’t bring herself to do it, she adds, because of the obvious community need she believes she is fulfilling.

At stake is a new program offered by her agency to offer much-in-demand after-school care for the children of working parents. The program is equipped to handle 76 children. Only 10 are enrolled. Yet 115 are on a waiting list with little hope of ever getting in.

The reason: new state legislation that funds public and nonprofit providers of after-school child care only if they are able to match each government-subsidized child with another who is paying full fare.

“Every day we operate, we go further into the hole,” said Levitt, whose program for latchkey children opened in June. “We can’t do that. I don’t have a rich board of directors.”

Caught in a Bind

Levitt’s program is one of several in the Southeast/Long Beach area caught in a bind created by legislation that went into effect earlier this year that allots $15.2 million to public and nonprofit agencies throughout the state. Its purpose was to provide subsidized latchkey services for children of the working poor. But to spread the money around and affect a political compromise, legislators decreed that for each hour of state-subsidized care offered by a funded agency, the agency must also provide an hour of care fully paid for by its recipient, a task that some agencies are finding difficult.

Comprehensive Child Development, for instance--whose patrons traditionally have been low-income families--has been able to recruit only five paying customers for its fall latchkey program. So although the state has promised the agency $100,000 in scholarships for those unable to pay the $1.59 hourly fee, Levitt can only subsidize five children while the rest wait to be matched with children who can pay. And because an enrollment of 10 is insufficient to defray administrative costs, the program may have to ultimately turn down the money altogether and close its doors.

The Long Beach Unified School District, which was granted more than $130,000 by the state, has been able to fill only 90 of its 120 slots: 40 with full-paying customers and 50 with subsidized children. The program is proceeding with the unequal ratio, according to child development director Carl Martin, in hopes that over a year the number of paying and non-paying children will balance out. But if that doesn’t happen, he said, the district will also consider closing its program.

And Bellflower Unified School District--which was allotted about $300,000 --has been able to balance the number of paying and non-paying students filling its 286 slots, but not the number of hours the children utilize. “Non-subsidized children tend to enroll for far fewer hours than the subsidized,” said Maryann Suggs, the district’s director of childhood education. As a result, she said, paying children in her program are served for only about three-fourths of the time that non-paying children are. “The theory is excellent,” Suggs said of the state’s matching requirement. “The problem is that in practice it isn’t working out.”

More Complaints Than Expected

Robert Cervantes, director of the state Department of Education’s child development division, which is overseeing the latchkey funding, said the state has received many more complaints about the 50-50 matching requirement than were expected. “It’s a statewide problem,” he said. “A good many agencies around the state are having problems with the 50-50.”

Of the 160 programs funded throughout California, he said, 35--nearly three times the number expected--have applied for waivers of the 50-50 requirement using an appeal process provided for by the legislation. Of the 35 requests, he said, six have already been granted.

“We want to be helpful and we know that situations change,” Cervantes said, “but our concern is that there be a continued good-faith effort to meet the spirit of the legislation.”

Among the waiver applications not yet acted on, he said, is one from Comprehensive Child Development and one from the Bellflower Unified School District.

To be sure, not all of the Southeast/Long Beach area’s latchkey programs receiving state funds are having problems meeting the requirements imposed by the funding.

Customers Screened

The City of Santa Fe Springs, which was granted about $100,000 to help subsidize its 120 after-school students, had no trouble getting half of them to pay full fare because most had been paying anyway since the program began operating four years ago. So instead of recruiting non-paying families to pay for what previously had been free, said Renee Jersensky, assistant supervisor for children’s services, the city had to screen customers who were already paying, to determine which were eligible for the state subsidies. “We found them right within our enrollment,” Jersensky said.

And in the Cerritos-based ABC Unified School District, finding paying customers to fill half of the 30 available slots has proved to be no problem.

“We have a waiting list for those who want to pay,” said Lilia Stapleton, the district’s administrator for special programs and services. “The area we serve is middle-class and upper-middle-class.”

For families in lower-income areas, though, the going has been rough. At Comprehensive Child Development--which serves three elementary schools in Long Beach’s Wrigley District--parents recently organized a weekend fair to raise money for subsidies to help assure the survival of the service they consider vital. But as area children begin returning to school this week, executive director Levitt said, the continued existence of the latchkey program is, at best, a day-by-day proposition.

“If the state grants us a waiver,” she said, “we might be able to make it.” Otherwise the future looks grim.

So the parents are playing a waiting game.

‘It’s Really Hard’

Shannon Rodriguez, a single mother of two, said she has agreed to pay the $48 a week it will cost to keep her 5-year-old daughter in the latchkey program without a subsidy, but she already knows that she won’t be able to afford it for more than two weeks.

“It’s really hard,” she said of living on the $850 a month she nets from her full-time job as a medical assistant. After paying $450 a month in rent, she said, she has little money left for food, clothing, gas and utilities. Unless more state subsidies become available, she said, her only alternative will be to find someone less expensive to watch her children after school. “I’ll probably hire a teen-ager,” she said. “I don’t like that.”

And Charlene Vandermast, also single, says the lack of latchkey subsidies --especially if it results in closure of the program--could ultimately force her to quit her job as a sales representative and go on welfare in order to stay home with her three children. “It boils down to either paying a baby sitter or feeding the kids,” Vandermast said. “Something’s got to go.”