Warner Center a Step Closer to Child Care
When the businesses of Warner Center open the doors to the Center for Childhood Creativity early next year, they will finally see the results of a mammoth job of planning that might seem worthier of a high-rise than a child-care center.
For the previous two years, Warner Center corporate leaders had been meeting regularly with San Fernando Valley politicians, welfare agency leaders, bureaucrats and school and university officials to work out the scores of problems standing in the way of employer-sponsored child care.
The purpose of all that planning was to produce a top-of-the-line child-care center that employers around the country could duplicate to solve their employees’ child-care difficulties.
Nevertheless, “the reality is that it won’t even touch the tip of the iceberg for serving the need” of Warner Center’s work force, said Julie Gertler, a deputy for Councilwoman Joy Picus, one of the center’s key promoters.
16,000 Employees, 75 Openings
Sponsored by an association of 15 Warner Center businesses with a combined 16,000 employees, the center will accommodate only 75 children, age 2 to 5.
Each of the nine companies putting money into the center will be allotted a share of those openings. Most have not decided how they will deal them out among employees who have expressed an interest.
Eligible parents won’t be getting bargain-basement prices: Tuition is expected to be $90 to $95 a week. That is no less--and is possibly a little more--than the typical fee at the nearly 600 private, profit-making child-care centers in the Valley, said Dianne Philibosian, director of the Warner Center Child Care Project, which created the center.
In spite of all that, backers of the center regard it as a milestone in the movement to build a rational, comprehensive child-care system for the nation’s swelling ranks of single working parents and two-worker households.
“Now that we’ve done it once, it’s going to be a lot easier to replicate it,” Philibosian said.
Project Planning Started in 1982
The seeds were sown for the Warner Center project in 1982, when the business world was far less receptive to the idea of employer-sponsored day care.
While stumping the West Valley, Picus, an early advocate, found an audience in the Warner Center Assn., a coalition of businesses formed by developer Robert Voit to work on common problems, such as employee transportation.
The association set child care as a priority and formed a committee to examine options.
At first, the effort involved what Norman Emerson, a Voit Cos. consultant who became coordinator of the project, characterized as “awareness.” That meant persuading businessmen that child care would be good for them.
“Businesses are busy doing their own business,” Picus aide Gertler said. They “needed to be convinced that it was going to be worth it to them. They wanted to see a business plan.”
The committee turned out a mountain of business plans, emphasizing such benefits to employers as reducing absenteeism and improving morale.
More persuasion came from United Way, which was then working with downtown businesses to start employer-sponsored child care in the inner city.
In a survey designed by United Way, Warner Center employees reported substantial discontent with their child-care options, either because available centers were too far away or were inadequate.
Once the businesses were committed to action, it was time for expert guidance, Emerson said.
The association recruited Philibosian, then coordinator of children’s play and development in the department of recreation and leisure studies at California State University, Northridge. After her arrival, the project radically departed from the course of two other employee-sponsored child-care projects then taking shape in the Valley. Both avoided direct administration by the sponsoring businesses.
One of them, a consortium whose members included Lockheed California Corp., Disney Studios and NBC in Burbank, was set up and run by the Burbank Unified School District.
In another approach, an industrial association in Valencia chose not to deal with the problems of running a school and merely recruited a private child-care center into the area with offers of marketing assistance. That school will open in May.
In contrast to these, Warner Center businessmen have been directly involved with the programs.
Aimed High
Philibosian presented them with strong ideas about the kind of child care that should be provided. She introduced plans to use the center as a teaching lab for the early childhood education department at CSUN. She proposed to staff it with professionals and student interns from the university and outlined a lofty standard of quality.
Key elements of her plan were creating an ethics committee to oversee the school staff and all student research, and using more teachers with higher educational qualifications than is required for a state license.
The state requires one teacher for each 12 students or a teacher and an aide for each 15 students, said Joseph Brocato, licensing program supervisor for the Department of Public Social Services.
The teachers must have completed 12 college units in early childhood education. Aides need only a high school diploma.
Philibosian proposed hiring one teacher for each seven students and insisted on paying teachers more than the going rate in the highly competitive child-care market.
“Traditionally, child-care professionals are very poorly paid,” Philibosian said. Although Brocato estimated that teachers earn from $5 to $8 an hour, Philibosian said the rate can be as low as $4 an hour.
In her plan, she said, teachers would be required to have or be working on a master’s degree and would earn more than $20,000 a year. Educational requirements and pay for aides and program directors would be proportionally higher than elsewhere in the industry, she said.
In a completely competitive situation, that would be difficult to achieve, Philibosian said.
‘Not Much Profit’
“The problem is, there’s not much profit once you build in the cost of the quality we’re talking about,” she said.
In the Warner Center project, Philibosian saw the possibility of overcoming competitive pressures by putting tuition entirely into operating costs and relying upon the businesses to supply the facility and pay initial costs.
It soon became evident, however, that a facility would have to be found outside Warner Center.
“The feeling was that we really wanted to find somewhat of a neutral site, not a site owned by one of the partners,” Emerson said. There was concern that the school would come to be “viewed as having a much greater identity with that partner,” he said.
Besides that, Gertler said, a state requirement for 75 square feet of outside play area for each child eliminated much of the available space within Warner Center.
The solution came from the Los Angeles Unified School District. The association found an idle upholstery shop on the campus of the West Valley Occupational Center, just east of Warner Center on Winnetka Avenue.
After long negotiation, the Board of Education leased the building to the child-care project last January for $500 a month, to cover utilities.
The association is spending about $110,000 to refurbish it, Emerson said. Ground breaking was last month.
Expanding Scope
In the meantime, the child-care project has continued to expand its horizons. The group incorporated as Warner Center Institute for Family Development, an umbrella organization designed to run the child-care center and pursue diverse ventures related to the problems of the family in the workplace.
Among the institute’s goals are forming projects for the care of infants and ill children and for parent training, and exploring the role of leisure in the two-worker family, Philibosian said. Its overall goal is to build a broad service--supported by business, government and private agencies--to treat the family as a basic unit of the workplace.
Admittedly, that is a radical vision. But, its proponents suggest, so was the concept of an employer-sponsored child-care center when they embarked upon it four years ago.
As a result of the meticulous planning, Warner Center businessmen look upon their child-care center the way that suits businessmen best, Emerson said, “with a sense of ownership.”
