L.A. Child-Care Plan Has Broad Scope : Proposed School-City Partnership Seen as Most Extensive in U.S.

Mayor Tom Bradley’s offer to have the city pay for after-school education and child-care programs on elementary school campuses in Los Angeles would create the most extensive school-city partnership for child care in the nation, officials said Tuesday.

In a “State of the City” address delivered Monday that dealt heavily with the city’s street gang problem, the mayor called for establishing the new after-school centers as a way to fight gang killings and drug use, which are the heaviest in poor areas of Los Angeles.

Although the mayor stressed the need for help in poorer areas, Bradley proposed that the program be put in place at all of the more than 400 elementary schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The district and its elected Board of Education run all the public schools in Los Angeles and in several adjacent cities and unincorporated areas.

Citing information from the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, which monitors school child-care programs, Mark D. Fabiani, an attorney on the mayor’s staff who helped research the proposal, said most existing school child-care efforts across the country operate in small suburban districts and are limited in scope.

Programs similar to the one Bradley has proposed exist in Fairfax County, Va.; Springfield, Ill., and Denver. Among the larger districts with programs are Houston, Miami and New York City.

The mayor’s program calls for operating child-care centers from the close of school until 6 p.m. and would strive to create “neighborhood environments” on the elementary school campuses. Children in kindergarten through sixth grades would be able to participate in sports, exercise and art classes, as well as activities designed to promote good study habits and provide positive role models for youngsters.

Self-Esteem a Goal

According to an outline of the program written by the mayor’s staff, the program would include special tutoring not only by teachers and community members but by high school students. Using older students as tutors could provide younger students with “the motivation necessary to prevent dropouts,” the report said.

In addition, it proposes using parents, other adults in the community and older students as counselors to help students build self-esteem and learn to resist peer pressure to join gangs or use drugs.

It suggests a student-to-staff ratio of 15 to 1, which is at least half the size of classes experienced by most district students.

The district is serving more than 11,000 children in after-school and child-care programs funded primarily by the state, but district officials say its efforts are inadequate.

“We’re full and have long waiting lists,” said Conchita Puncel, who directs the district’s child development division.

The district operates 90 child-care centers for preschool and elementary school children from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., as well as four infant centers for the children of teen-age mothers. Fees are assessed on a sliding scale based on parents’ income, but the majority of parents are poor and do not pay. Puncel said the full cost of the service is $18 a day.

District officials were full of praise for the mayor’s proposal.

“I think it’s fantastic,” said school board member Jackie Goldberg. “I have lived here all my life, and I don’t recall a single other mayor saying the city has a moral responsibility to its schoolchildren. That is a wonderful message. This (program would be) a tremendous breakthrough.”

Board President Rita Walters said the program would help “get kids off the street and . . . divert them from participation in gangs.”

“That would be a major benefit. It also would give our children a little more exposure to the educational process. Our children go to school a shorter period of time than children in most industrialized countries,” she said.

The proposal calls for launching the program in 10 pilot schools.

“Our intention is to identify those schools as soon as possible,” Deputy Supt. Sidney A. Thompson said.

The 10 schools probably will be in areas where the problems of gangs and drugs are most severe, he said, mentioning South-Central and East Los Angeles, Venice and parts of the East San Fernando Valley and the harbor area.

In the mayor’s speech Monday, he said the city would be willing to commit “several hundred million dollars” to the school program over two decades, even though City Hall has no legal responsibility for the social well-being of children. A background paper prepared by the mayor’s staff gave the only details, saying the city’s financial aid would reach $700 million.

However, on Tuesday, Deputy Mayor Mike Gage said the $700 million figure was a “typographical error” and that the actual city commitment would be decided later by an “education council” yet to be named by Bradley. But Gage said the funding for child care and tutoring would almost certainly be less than $700 million.

Bradley said the money will come from higher property taxes collected downtown on land where the property values have soared under redevelopment. State law requires the new, higher property taxes generated by redevelopment to be used only for purposes that further reduce blight in the area where the taxes were collected.

The Community Redevelopment Agency, which must certify that those taxes are used for legitimate redevelopment purposes, already allows the so-called “tax increment funds” collected downtown to be used for projects elsewhere in the city, on the grounds that they benefit the aims of downtown redevelopment. For example, the Los Angeles Unified School District has received $3.2 million from the CRA for classroom construction and remodeling in Chinatown.

Bradley aides said the city may need a change in state law, however, to allow the use of CRA money for a citywide school project such as Bradley proposed Monday. But the mayor’s staff said they think it would be easy to win political approval for the change.

A more important hurdle may be Bradley’s insistence that the program be funded only if the city can convince a Superior Court judge to lift a spending cap that prevents the city from using more than $750 million in redevelopment dollars collected from the downtown “central business district” redevelopment area.

Bradley and the CRA have asked that the $750 million cap be raised to $5 billion, and that about half be used for housing and homeless programs.