Parents in Need of Day Care Find It’s Hard to Come By

For two years, Teresa Ledezma, a single parent, has tried to enroll her 4-year-old daughter in a preschool near her Pacoima home. Ledezma wants Cynthia to learn to interact with other children and get a head start on kindergarten.

But the places that are within her financial reach--those funded in part by the state or by the private sector--have never had a place for Cynthia.

“One place told me she was too old, another told me she was not old enough and the other was full,” Ledezma said.

Instead, she pays her mother $25 a week to care for Cynthia, but sporadic mail room work at $5.50 an hour makes even that small price a hardship. When her daughter is sick, Ledezma finds herself slipping away from work to take her to the doctor or to her sister’s house.

Ledezma is not alone. Parents of as many as 8,000 children who need day care in the northeast San Fernando Valley are out of luck, according to two private studies, evidence that the shortage of affordable child care in Los Angeles has reached crisis proportions in the city’s poorer areas.

Eviction Notice

The pending eviction of Escuela de la Gente, one of the largest day-care centers in Pacoima, to make way for a mini-mall has brought the problem into stark focus for mothers who depend on that center. The 10-year-old school, which serves 75 children ages 2 to 5, received an eviction notice in December that was upheld in March by a Municipal Court judge.

When Escuela de la Gente mothers reviewed their options, they found that most of their friends leave children with unlicensed--and sometimes expensive--baby-sitters and miss work to shuttle their children from family member to family member.

“A lot of people just rely on informal care--relatives, friends,” said Dorothy Fleisher, an administrator with United Way. “Then the kids come to school with no skills in a school system that expects much more. They are competing against kids who have more preparation, so they’re starting at a disadvantage.”

People become so frustrated with the day-care situation that they give up, quit work and return to the welfare rolls, said Maria Valadez of Pacoima, who has a 3-year-old son at Escuela de la Gente, a 9-year-old son in elementary school and a 1-year-old daughter who stays with a baby-sitter. Valadez knows mothers who leave their small children alone or with strangers. She knows of children who have been molested while in the care of others.

“It gives you a lot of trauma, believe me,” Valadez said. “I don’t trust anyone but that little school.”

Problems at Escuela de la Gente--”School of the People”--seem to have been resolved, at least temporarily, by location of interim lodging at the Kinder Kare Children’s Center around the corner. But a reprieve for mothers of those 75 children stops far from filling the day-care void in the northeast Valley.

Valadez works full time for a cable system manufacturer, which pays $5 an hour. Through state subsidies, Escuela de la Gente is free for her and other low-income families, but the baby-sitter who cares for her daughter charges $40 a week. When the school’s future looked bleak, Valadez thought about leaving a second child with the baby-sitter.

“But I thought, ‘I can’t afford to pay $40 a week, but I pay it. Eighty dollars a week I could never afford,’ ” she said.

The two studies of day-care resources--one by United Way and the other by Crystal Stairs, a referral agency--uncovered a particularly critical lack of state-subsidized care in the northeast Valley, an area where most parents cannot afford to pay full price. Under the subsidies, parents are charged a maximum $9.54 a day, depending on their income.

About 1,000 children are enrolled at subsidized centers in the area, which typically have long waiting lists. The Child Care Resource Center of the San Fernando Valley, a regional referral agency, has up to a two-year delay for parents seeking subsidized care at some centers or in licensed day-care homes. Escuela de la Gente has 200 people waiting for openings.

‘A Lot Give Up’

“At one point, we had 3,000 names on our waiting list, but we find some have been on the list for years,” said Lorraine Schrag, resource center director. “They move out of the area, they find someone down the street and a lot of people do give up.”

Ledezma, who rents a room across the street from Valadez, has had her daughter on a waiting list at Escuela de la Gente for two years.

She would like to finish her high school education and study mathematics at a junior college to help make herself more marketable, a goal that might be attainable if Cynthia were enrolled in a subsidized center during the day. But Ledezma figures that she’ll have to postpone that dream until Cynthia enters school the year after next.

“I tried taking night classes two years ago, but financially I couldn’t handle it. I was broke,” she said.

In the study conducted by United Way last spring, U.S. Census estimates were compared with day-care licensing lists from the state Department of Social Services. The United Way found a shortfall of more than 8,000 child-care spaces in the northeast Valley and it found no sick child care and very little infant care or after-school care.

“What we discovered is there’s not enough spaces available, and some of the spaces that are available are not affordable,” said Mel Wilson, a Pacoima real estate agent and chairman of the United Way child care subcommittee.

Wilson said that before United Way embarked on the study, he knew there was a need for more child care, but he was surprised to learn that there were more than 100 empty spaces in child-care centers in the northeast Valley. Providers said those spaces could not be filled because they were not subsidized and parents could not afford to pay full price, which ranges from $60 to more than $100 a week.

The Child Care Resource Center relies on statistics gathered in November, 1987, by another Los Angeles referral agency, Crystal Stairs. While the study found a need for more child care throughout the Valley, the northeast Valley was in the direst straits, with a shortage of 7,494 spaces.

Valleywide, more than half of the child-care need was being met, the agency found, while in the northeast Valley, just slightly more than a third of those children who need child care could be accommodated. Among infants, the need was even more desperate: Only 17% of the need for infant care was being met in the northeast Valley, while about 30% was met in the rest of the Valley.

Panorama City, Mission Hills, Sylmar, Pacoima and part of North Hollywood were in the worst shape.

Unlicensed Homes

Child-care advocates suggest that the lack of affordable child care has spawned an abundance of cheaper, unlicensed day-care homes. Julie Ruelas, who runs one of 54 licensed day-care homes in the northeast Valley, believes that there are more unlicensed than licensed centers in her area.

“They don’t have any regulations at all, that’s the problem,” Ruelas said. “A lot of them might be just fine, of course, but you just don’t know.”

Like most parents, Rosemarie Santoy of Mission Hills worries not only about the quantity of child care, but also the quality.

Santoy, whose husband left her when she was eight months pregnant with their second child, tired of the dependency cycle of welfare and found a job at a grocery store.

At first she worked part time, breaking her day in two to move her young children from one baby-sitter to another. Then the baby-sitter confessed that her teen-age son had hit Santoy’s son, Michael, in the crotch, which Santoy believes was an attempt at sexual abuse.

“When I found out about this, I was really worried,” Santoy said. “I didn’t know where to go.”

Soon after, Santoy heard about Escuela de la Gente through friends and enrolled Michael, 4. She works full-time now and says she is luckier than many of the Escuela parents because her mother cares for her daughter, Jacqueline, 2, and probably could also have taken Michael had the school closed.

“But I was afraid that two would be too much of a burden on my mother,” she said.

Prospects for additional government subsidies in an era of budget cuts are slim, child-care advocates acknowledge. Bills pending in Congress include a $1,000-a-year tax break for child care, backed by President Bush, and a sweeping child-care reform bill co-authored by Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.).

Critics complain that there is no guarantee that the $1,000 tax break would be spent on child care and that it does not nearly offset the cost of child care, which Patsy Lane, child-care coordinator for the city of Los Angeles, estimated is $3,000 to $5,000 a year. Cranston’s bill, with a price tag of $2.5 billion its first year, faces considerable opposition from conservatives.

The state’s newest child-care initiative is folded into welfare reform known as Greater Avenues for Independence. GAIN is scheduled to start in the Valley in May.

Under GAIN, women on public assistance with children ages 3 or older must enter school, job training or work. In return, GAIN includes elaborate assurances that child care will be provided by the state, but so far many of the mothers participating in GAIN in Los Angeles County have found their own “informal” child care with family or friends, according to Ray Garcia, coordinator for GAIN in Los Angeles County.

“That seems to be the trend because there’s not the demand for child-care reimbursement and child-care slots we had anticipated,” Garcia said. “But whether that trend will continue or not we don’t know.”

GAIN has hired 10 resource and referral agencies in Los Angeles County to recommend areas where more child-care slots are needed, Garcia said. Those agencies will then need to encourage new providers and provide licensing preparation assistance to them.

The lack of interest in child care through GAIN is another indication that the program victimizes the poor, said Kevin Aslanian, advocate for the California Coalition of Welfare Rights Organizations in Sacramento.

“We estimate that 60% of the people who are participating in GAIN and paying for child care do not get their child care paid by GAIN,” Aslanian said. “The counties make it very difficult to get child care . . . in some cases requiring child-care providers to come to the welfare office to meet the case worker. Most people do not want to advertise the fact that they are on welfare.

“This is going to perpetuate the problem down there,” he said. “We’re going to have more and more 12-year-olds watching 6-year-olds.”

An ambitious education overhaul plan under consideration by Los Angeles Unified School District officials includes adding preschool classes for 4-year-olds to district elementary schools and providing summer school options for all elementary students. Associate Supt. Paul M. Possemato said that if existing integration funds can be tapped, the preschools could begin opening later this year.

In the private sector, churches help support several parish-based child-care centers, and the North Valley YWCA runs an infant learning center for teen mothers at San Fernando High School.

United Way supports 72 child-care programs throughout Los Angeles County including Escuela de la Gente--where it partially subsidizes 25 slots--and five other centers.

A $5,000 contribution to United Way from Kaiser Foundation Health Plan will be added to $10,000 in United Way funds to increase the amount of day care in the northeast Valley, Fleisher said.

United Way also has tried to involve private companies by alerting them to the tax incentives of subsidizing employee child care, beginning at a child-care conference in October. But Wilson acknowledged that results have been less than spectacular. So far, one company has decided to do an employee child-care survey and another is considering it, Fleisher said.

“I knew it would be a slow process,” Wilson said. “But it’s frustrating that things don’t move faster than they do.”