Child Care Issue Poses Dilemma for City, Parents

Searching through the Glendale yellow pages, the divorced single mother found no listings under child care.

After going through two baby sitters who she said charged too much and putting the children on waiting lists, she was able to enroll them in an after-school program run by the school district.

The mother, who requested anonymity, still had to leave the children waiting alone outside their school in the early morning so she could get to work. In the evening, she would rush home to get them. The day-care center closed at 6 p.m. and charged $10 for every 10 minutes she was late.

Last month, the cost finally became too much for the mother, who was making only $19,000 a year. She was paying more than $100 a month for child care and couldn’t pay her bills. That was when she decided to send her children away.

They now live with their father in Germany.

“I miss them,” she said. “I’m going through hell right now without them, but being a low-income single parent, I just couldn’t handle it.”

Local child care advocates say her case is not unusual. Citing waiting lists at day-care centers of up to two years and armed with statistics they say show Glendale is significantly short of child care options at all economic levels, they charge that city government and local businesses have failed to meet the challenge of a rapidly growing city and a work force now populated by almost as many women as men.

“Child care is at such a crisis level right now. It’s a crisis for parents who can’t find it. It’s a crisis for centers that can’t find good staff. It’s a crisis that simply has to be dealt with, because the new work force we’re seeing isn’t going to disappear,” said Pam Kisor, director of the Child Care Center at Glendale Adventist Medical Center.

More than 2,500 of the 16,000 children in Glendale under 12 are in need of child care, according to a 1986 study by Crystal Stairs, a state-funded resource and referral agency in Pasadena. A United Way study conducted last year found that of 12,125 Glendale children from kindergarten through sixth grade, child care centers in the city lacked 3,318 spaces for the 3,959 children of working parents needing care.

Progressive Approach

Glendale officials feel that the city has been progressive in its approach to child care because of its involvement with the Glendale Employers Child Care Consortium, an innovative joint public/private venture between the city, the school district and three private firms.

But, after 10 months of operation, the consortium is in financial trouble because of high operating costs. The Glendale school district recently pulled out as operator of the program.

Child care advocates point out that its program only has facilities for 90 children and is geared primarily to employees of consortium members, whereas the number of children in Glendale needing care is far greater.

There are now 34 licensed child care centers in Glendale and 44 people licensed for in home day care, said Marjorie Morris, executive director of the state-funded Child Care Resource Center of the San Fernando Valley, which covers Glendale. Fewer than 300 of those spaces are state-subsidized, which makes the outlook for low-income parents particularly bleak, she said. Waiting lists at most centers average more than 200 people at a time and parents can wait up to two years for a space, Morris said.

‘Minimal Standards’

Morris said the number of people providing unlicensed in-home day care is probably twice the number of licensed homes, but said no one knows for sure. Most unlicensed care is provided by extended family members, she said, but some unlicensed care is in facilities that are inadequate for children.

“A lot of places around . . . you or I might not like to use for our children,” she said. “There are . . . minimal standards.”

More than half the licensed child care centers in Glendale today existed 10 years ago, Morris said. But the number of requests the San Fernando service receives for child care has more than tripled in that same period. Morris said the service has received an average of 1,000 calls a month this year.

For their part, elected officials in Glendale think that local government should limit its involvement in child care. Mayor Ginger Bremberg cited the city’s involvement in the consortium as proof that the city has addressed parents’ needs and said she thinks that the demand for child care exists mainly among mothers from high-income families who don’t need to work.

“I don’t see any reason why tax dollars should go to help yuppie women get BMWs and a $350,000 house for status symbols when the tax dollars have many other things that they can be used for,” Bremberg said. “I don’t think it’s the government’s responsibility to provide child care for that kind of couple. We’re not going to do it, it’s an absolute bottomless pit.”

Need Is Characteristic

The need for child care in Glendale is characteristic of municipalities nationwide. According to a 1987 study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 45% of mothers in the United States with children under age 3, and nearly half the mothers with children less than 1 year old, are employed--mostly out of economic necessity. As a result, people without child care licenses are looking after many employees’ children during working hours.

In California, the figure is above the national average at 51%, the California Commission for Economic Development said in 1987. The same study estimates that only one-third of the 1 million children needing care in the state can at present be served in licensed facilities.

For working mothers, such statistics mean hardship as they try to find adequate care for their children.

Every weekday morning before work, Lisa Malone, 29, wakes her 4-year-old daughter, Meagan, up at 5 a.m. She dresses and feeds her and drives from her home in Glendale to Panorama City, where her sister-in-law takes care of Meagan. Then she drives to work in Burbank. In the evening she drives the same circuitous route again, getting Meagan back home at 7:30, just in time to bathe her, feed her, and put her to bed.

Malone, a single parent who works at the Burbank Post Office, said she is fortunate to have a relative who will care for her child.

She went through months of searching after firing a baby sitter she found taking narcotics while alone with the child. “If I could get a job with a company who would help me take care of her, I’d never leave,” she said. “I get scared about finding a sitter for her in the future.”

Child care advocates in Glendale are urging consistent involvement by local government in helping employers meet child care needs.

“The city really needs a policy that speaks to what the city can do in such areas as finding locations and facilitating more efforts like the child care consortium,” said Georgeanne Thompson of the Greater Glendale Child Care Council, a public advocacy group formed in January to address the child care problem in the Glendale area.

“The council is hopeful that the city of Glendale will consider the responsibility of the employer to be just as great in providing child care as it is in providing parking. We make provisions for spaces for our cars, it’s just as important to make provisions for spaces for our children.”

Advocates cite the full-time child care coordinators hired in recent years by cities such as Los Angeles, Irvine and Pasadena and say it is time for city government in Glendale to provide the same type of service.

Coordinators in those cities are working with government officials to ease the permit process for new child care centers and working with employers to encourage forming child care consortiums. At present, 25 cities nationwide have such full-time coordinators.

Three years after the city of Irvine began to fund two full-time employees in a child care coordination office, day care in the city is available for an additional 500 children as a result of government efforts, said Irvine Child Care Coordinator Nancy Noble.

Bremberg said she opposes instituting such a program in Glendale, and other council members are lukewarm on the idea.

‘Not That Much Demand’

“You either do what a city is designed to do, what it’s charted to do, that is, not social services, or you go bankrupt,” Bremberg said. “Why have a full-time child care coordinator? There is not that much demand.”

Bremberg said the city should assist employers in setting up child care programs, but should not contribute financially to child care efforts in the future or hire people to coordinate such efforts full time.

City Councilman Larry Zarian said he also is not convinced that city funds should be used for child care.

“I’m not sure the government should subsidize child care for married couples,” he said. “There’s no denial there’s a great need, and it will probably increase every year. The problem is if you subsidize child care, where do you take it from, your infrastructure? It becomes an unfair taxation on parents that don’t have children or that have children that are already grown.”

Since it was founded 10 months ago, the Greater Glendale Child Care Council has pointed to the Glendale Employers Child Care Consortium as an example of what Glendale employers could achieve on a larger scale. But with this month’s announcement that the Glendale school district will pull out of the consortium, council organizers say they are not sure of the solutions to the city’s child care problem.

“We know there are problems in those areas but we haven’t decided whether to lobby local government or what to do about it,” said Jane Whitaker, vice president of the council and a member of the school board of the Glendale Unified School District. “I’m not sure that as a city, as a community, that anybody has sat down and looked at what the impact is going to be on the need for child care as this city grows.”

Educator Helping

Donald Empy, deputy superintendent for instruction at Glendale Community College, is working with the Child Care Council to educate employers about child care. He said most Glendale employers do not think they can benefit by providing child care and do not know much about it.

“There’s still that feeling very broadly that this is not something employers should become involved with,” he said. “They look at it and they see that it’s going to cost them quite a bit of money and they don’t necessarily see much in it for them.”

CIGNA Healthplans California, which employs more than 500 people in its Glendale office, has no child care facilities for its employees at any of its 30 offices in Southern California, Del Bowman, a spokesman for CIGNA, said.

“It just isn’t economically or geographically feasible to adopt a child care program for all those locations,” Bowman said.

A spokesperson for Security Pacific National Bank, which has more than 2,700 employees in Glendale, said the company does not provide any on-site child care facilities and has no corporation-wide policy on child care.

Child care advocates say employers will see the dividends of providing child care in employees who are less fatigued and less preoccupied during the day, but acknowledge that child care would probably cost employers significant amounts.

The need for infant care is growing in Glendale as mothers return to work earlier, said Marjorie Morris, director of the San Fernando Valley Resource and Referral Center, which serves Glendale.

There are only two child care centers that care for infants in Glendale, and both are small programs primarily for the employees of four employers. Child care advocates in Glendale say they are not sure what the answers are, but with the financial difficulties of the Glendale Employers Child Care Consortium providing a graphic example of the problems, they are beginning to step up efforts to address the community’s child care needs.

The Council is planning to establish its own referral network specifically for parents seeking child care in the Glendale area, and Child Care Council members said plans have been proposed to lobby city government and pressure local businesses to provide such care.

“Right now, it’s out of sight and out of mind,” Thompson said. “We have to make people realize it’s needed, because the people who need care the most don’t always speak for themselves.”