On-the-Job Learning : Children of Moorpark Company’s Employees Go to School at the Office

Benjamin Hatcher’s role a G. T. Water Products in Moorpark lets him get out of company headquarters to see the world quite a bit. The same goes for Jennifer Tash and Shannon Gabrilson.

Some days, they’re off to the zoo. Other days, it’s whale-watching or a visit to the Getty Museum.

But when they’re at G. T., which makes plumbing equipment, it’s always work, work, work: not marketing or inventory control, but lots of math, social studies and science.

That may sound like light fare for executives, but Hatcher, Tash and Gabrilson aren’t executives. They’re children--three of the 12 students in a school run exclusively for the children of G. T. employees.

G. T.’s owner, George Tash, wasn’t looking to get his company national attention two years ago when he decided to open a private school for his employees. He was just looking for alternative education for his two kids.

Noted in Magazine

But the innovation earned the small company, which makes toilet plungers, water-powered pumps and cleaning devices for clogged drains, a spot on Working Mother magazine’s list of the 60 best companies in the U.S. to work for. The New York-based magazine’s list in its October issue also included bigger enterprises, such as IBM and AT&T.;

The one-teacher school costs G. T. only about $30,000 a year to run. It is free to parents and cares for children from the beginning of the workday until the end. The company has 29 employees and does about $3 million a year in sales.

Employee turnover is always a worry for a small company. But Candice Jameson Bilaver, G. T.’s vice president for marketing, says turnover isn’t a problem and management wants to keep it that way.

“The peace of mind to the mothers who have worked here has been incredible,” said Bilaver. “They can concentrate on their jobs.”

The school, set up in a room at G. T’s offices, is a throwback to the days of the one-room schoolhouse. Tash hired Brian Kearsey, who had taught at a Montessori school in Thousand Oaks, to run his school for children 4 to 16. The school is run according to the philosophy of Maria Montessori, who believed that children should be largely left alone to teach themselves.

Performance Tests

The school has to demonstrate only that it has a curriculum and takes attendance to be approved by the state. But Kearsey said the students also take yearly state-designed tests to show they are progressing apace.

Janette Rose, G. T.’s customer service manager, has two of her three children--Athena, 11, and Arielle, 8--attending the school. “I can go home at night and I don’t feel like I’ve been away from my kids all day long,” said Rose.

Indeed, five of the seven working mothers in G. T.’s office suite have put their children in the school, Bilaver said. The children of the others, she said, are too young or too old. Bilaver said only one working mother in G. T.’s factory has enrolled her child--but then hers is the only child is between 4 and 16 right now.

G. T.’s willingness to deal with working mothers’ problems is no accident. Women fill three of the four top sales slots at the company. Of the 10-person office staff, seven are mothers, Bilaver said. Tash offers flexible work hours and maternity leave for his employees.

The number of women on its staff makes G. T. only a small, extreme case of the feminization of the workplace that has taken place nationally over the past 25 years. In 1980, about 43% of the work force were women--compared to 33% in 1960, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And of the 14.6 million women who joined the work force between 1960 and 1984, about 8 million came from families with children, according to a 1987 study by the Hudson Institute in Indianapolis.

Two Incomes Needed

The study said the surge in two-income couples is due to the fact that “slow economic growth has made two earners a necessity for many families striving for a middle-class life style.”

Milton Moskowitz and Carol Townsend, who wrote “The 60 Best Companies for Working Mothers” magazine article, found only one company in the country that has started an on-premises school. In 1987, American Bankers Insurance Group in Miami paid construction costs to have the Dade County school system start an elementary school for about 78 kindergarten, first and second grade students of employees.

Despite its help with some working parents’ problems, G. T. pays its 19 factory workers only standard industry wages of $6 to $7.50 an hour.

But Bilaver said that workers who stay with the company for several years can make more. And she pointed out that the company extends a profit-sharing pension plan--worth about 15-20% of a worker’s annual salary--to all its employees. Moreover, the school itself is worth a good deal to the parents who use it.

4-Day Weeks

And G. T. gives its factory workers the option of working only four days a week with full benefits. The company’s bookkeeper, a mother, works only Tuesday through Friday, too. Bilaver said the company takes pride in giving mothers time off for their children’s dental appointments and the like.

But Tash, 48, doesn’t want all this to sound to sound sexist: “If a man came here and he was a single parent raising kids, it would be the same.”

Class at G. T.’s school may not much resemble most people’s memory of grade school. On a recent morning, the 12 students attending Montessori-style classes were squirming and whispering while they took themselves through self-guided studies.

One girl sat at a personal computer playing “Math Rabbit,” while a group of children read together about Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster, and another girl--George Tash’s 12-year-old daughter, Jennifer--got help in algebra from teacher Kearsey.

‘Teachers Were Dead’

Tash himself never took much to structured learning, and the school experiences of his children left him fed up. “The teachers, they would say they were having problems with the kids, so I went to the school to see what the problem was,” said Tash. “The teachers were dead. They lacked life. They just had a job.”

The beginnings of Tash’s company date to 1969 when he was working as a self-taught carpenter and made a contraption of scrap parts to clean his own drains. Tash remembered seeing his father cleaning out clogs by sticking a hose down the drain with a cloth wrapped around the end to contain the pressure. Tash tried the same thing with a valve made of a bicycle inner tube and a hair curler.

“It didn’t work that well, but it proved the principle,” said Tash.

Even the principle didn’t seem all that impressive at first, though. When Tash took the as-yet-uncrowned Drain King to a patent lawyer, he was told it wasn’t worth patenting.

Finally Tash simply took a box of his devices to a gardening store. For point-of-sale marketing, he “wrote on the end of a shoe box, ‘Unclog your drains fast,’ or something like that.” Those words, though simple, proved effective. “I went back in a week and they were all gone.”

Ran From Home

With a $1,000 bank loan, Tash soon hired a three-person assembly line and got seriously into business. He ran the assembly line in his living room in Van Nuys. The warehouse was his den. By 1972, Tash said, he was doing about $300,000 in sales.

Today G. T. Water Products makes and sells seven product lines to plumbing supply houses and hardware store chains such as Ace, True Value, Trustworthy and Sears, Roebuck and Co. The products range from its Drain King de-clogger to a water-powered pump and decorator toilet plungers.

But Tash and Bilaver argue it’s not so much one product as G. T. Water Products’ longstanding flexibility with its employees that has helped the company grow.

Said Bilaver: “It’s allowed a company that probably would not have succeeded to succeed.”