Corporations Taking Child Care in Hand : Irvine Firms Say Easing Employees’ Worries Is Good for Business
Roger and Karen Rostvold didn’t like the idea of their two children being home alone after school, but the Irvine couple didn’t like the alternatives, either.
The Rostvolds, who both work, tried private in-home care, only to find that eight or ten children were staying in one home, and they tried child-care centers, which they said weren’t convenient to their childrens’ elementary school.
It is a dilemma shared by parents nationwide, but it is especially severe in Irvine, where an estimated 70% of the 19,000 elementary school children in the Irvine Unified School District come from two-worker families and up to 4,000 come home to an empty house after school.
Lack of property zoned for child-care centers compounds the master-planned city’s problem, said Thomas H. Nielsen, vice chairman of Irvine Co., which developed much of the city.
“Even though Irvine is a planned community, no plans were made for child care when the city was being designed” in the late 1960s, he said. “The issue of child care didn’t exist then.”
As child care became a social issue, the Irvine City Council and the school district sought a solution in 1984 by forming the Irvine Child Care Project to develop a method of providing after-school care for the city’s children.
The nonprofit agency turned immediately to Irvine Co. to help fund the program, but only in the last year has appealed to the rest of the city’s business community. Irvine Co. is still the biggest supporter, recently agreeing to guarantee a $5.5-million bond issue scheduled later this year. The funds will be used for a major expansion of Irvine Child Care Project programs.
Corporations have an obligation and self-interest to help with child care, said Bob Reigrod, vice president of the Brother International Corp.’s Western headquarters in Irvine.
He said that all types of nonprofit organizations ask him for money, but child care is an obvious concern. Many workers express worries about their children, and ask the company to subsidize care.
The benefit for a company, Reigrod and others said, is that absenteeism, tardiness and stress decrease and productivity increases when working parents don’t spend time on the job worrying about their children.
Although they often acknowledge that lack of adequate child-care facilities creates social and economic problems, many corporations are unwilling to assume an active role in finding solutions.
And, in some cases, it isn’t unwillingness that keeps businesses from doing their share, but simply the fact that they haven’t been asked:
- County supervisors in Fairfax County, Va., noticed a shortage for school-age child care in 1974, and immediately turned unused classrooms into after-school and summertime child-care facilities. About 2,000 students in the county--location of the planned community of Reston--are in the government-funded program, which uses 58 schools and will expand to 75 next year.
“We have an enormous waiting list of about 600 kids, even after the 17 new projects,” said Judith Rosen, director of the Fairfax County Office for Children.
In Reston, which is older than Irvine, local businesses are only now being asked to participate in a study of what can be done to ease the child-care crunch.
- Plano, Tex., a planned community outside Dallas, is much like Irvine, with young, upper-middle-class residents who rely on double incomes to afford the affluent suburbs. But finding a solution to the problem of after-school care for children has been left to private care providers.
“They do pretty well, but in Texas, we’ve got other priorities now,” said Plano Health Department Director Ben Torres, referring to the state’s depressed oil economy.
- In Dallas, a resource and referral organization called Child Care Dallas was greeted with skepticism when it approached employers and workers earlier this year. “ ‘Why are you here? What do you want from us?’ they asked us,” said Barbara Bergman, executive director of the agency. “We’re light years behind Irvine.”
Texas Instruments, one of Dallas’ largest employers, provides no child-care assistance. “We’d rather be in the technology business than the child-care business,” said Stan Victor, a company spokesman.
- In San Diego, child care needs have been addressed since the beginning of its post-war boom in the 1940s, when federal and state funds were funneled into the city to aid the swelling number of families with children. The subsidized program continues today, serving 1,200 school-aged children.
- In San Francisco, a developers tax is levied to help pay for construction of child-care facilities.
But few cities, including its neighbors, are using Irvine’s technique of asking the corporate community to be a partner in finding a solution.
“Irvine has evolved like no other city,” said Rory Darrah, a staff member at the California Child Care Resources and Referral Network in San Francisco.
Modular Facilities Favored
To help get the program started, the Irvine Co. put up $250,000 in seed money after the Irvine Child Care Project decided that the best solution was to house care facilities in portable, modular facilities on school grounds. Children can go directly from classes to day care, staying in one location until their parents pick them up.
The modular facilities have been installed at four of Irvine’s 18 elementary schools, providing care for 500 elementary school children.
But eight additional schools have requested child-care centers of their own and the $125,000-per-unit start-up cost inspired the Irvine Child Care Project to form the Irvine Children’s Fund to solicit corporate contributions.
In its first year, the fund drive, headed by Barbara Wiener, has raised $60,000 from more than 25 companies.
All of the working mothers at Brother International, for example, have lost time from work because of child-care problems, Reigrod, the senior vice president, said. Brother employs 105 people in Irvine and is one of the companies that has pledged annual contributions to the child-care fund.
Bill Shepherd, president of Allergan Inc., which contributed $25,000, said that supporting Irvine Child Care Project is a hassle-free and unique solution to the problem.
His company gets the benefits that come when working parents aren’t worrying about their children, but doesn’t have to put up with the expense and insurance liabilities of operating a center on its premises.
“There are a million and one concerns for a company, but when you have high employment you -have to take care of your employees’ needs, so you must provide for child care,” said Todd Nicholson, president of the Industrial League of Orange County.
Encouraged Contributions
The Industrial League endorsed the fund and encouraged contributions in a letter to its members in May.
Corporate involvement in after-school child care will become a necessity across the country if businesses expect to find and keep a productive labor pool, said Jerry Greeson, one of the leaders of the child-care fact-finding group started by the chamber of commerce in Reston, Va.
Greeson said a coalition of 24 Reston-based companies is working to find more space for child-care facilities within the city. The group also is studying methods of providing care and is assessing the plausibility of persuading local companies to contribute land and money to build more facilities. Reston, with 45,000 population, is about half the size of Irvine, and has grown almost as fast as Irvine over the past five years.
Greeson said new companies are joining the coalition every week, making him optimistic about the chances of raising money when the time comes.
In Irvine, corporate contributions are used to open facilities after parents request assistance and promise to oversee them.
The Irvine Unified School District has allowed the Child Care Project to set up a pair of 930-square-foot modular facilities on school grounds. The seed money from the Irvine Co. and a $262,000 federal block grant was used to pay for the first four facilities, which serve about 20% of the children in the city who need after-school care, said Wiener, president of the Irvine Children’s Fund.
Modular units are used because school buildings are at capacity during the day, when younger children don’t go to school, said Mary Ellen Hadley, director of the project. Hadley said it is impractical to keep an entire school open after the regular instructional day.
Fees Cover Expenses
In three of the centers, parents have hired the staff. A child-care management group has been hired at the fourth. Fees for each child cover operating expenses and payments on a loan used to buy the units.
At the after-school facility at Stone Creek Elementary School, Rostvold, who is the parent group president, said he found Irvine Child Care Project’s system an attractive alternative to in-home and commercial child care.
He said that heading the group means that sometimes phone calls from parents interrupt him at his real estate consulting business. For instance, many of them recently questioned the length of naps their children were taking.
“It really doesn’t bother me,” he said. “It’s my way of making a contribution, and making sure children receive good care.”
