Parents Protest Day-Care Shutdown

Three women--an out-of-work housekeeper, a legal secretary and a shoe-factory worker--gathered with their children outside the now-closed Echo Park Day Care Center on Tuesday to commiserate about their plight.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” said the housekeeper, Vilma Marquina, 38, as she tied the shoelaces of her son, Hugo, 6. “This is the closest center to my house.”

“The city just doesn’t care,” added Patricia Mendoza, a 26-year-old secretary, who interrupted the conversation to tell her 4-year-old daughter, Sandra, that no, she could not have any more ice cream.

The day before, the two women and Marta Dorantes, 32, the shoe-factory worker, had been called--with scarcely two hours’ notice--to come pick up their children because the center had been shut down by the state Department of Social Services.

Last month, two part-time male employees were accused of molesting children at the center. Although the men were immediately dismissed, state officials said Monday that the facility should be closed because of conduct “inimical to the health, welfare and safety of the children.”

The closure of the city-run center left about 40 parents without child care.

On Tuesday, a handful of parents, mostly single women, took a day off from work to stage an eight-hour protest. They held signs that read, “Punish the criminals, not our children” and “We need our day care center.”

The Echo Park program received government subsidies, and most of the parents who used the facility were poor. Some paid as little as $40 a month for a service that can cost $250 a month at private centers.

Officials of the city Recreation and Parks Department, which ran the day-care center, told parents at a Monday night meeting that the city would help them find alternatives.

The officials gave parents a list of facilities where they could find child care. But on Tuesday, Michelle Stover, 33, said the city had not yet kept its promise.

“Some of the parents went down to these places where they had openings, and they were turned away,” said Stover, whose 6-year-old son, Salvador, attended an after-school program at the Echo Park center.

Ironically, the list of alternative day-care centers included the now-closed Echo Park center. Below the center’s address and phone number was the notation “No openings.”

Recreation and Parks Department spokesman Al Goldfarb said Tuesday that he was not aware that parents were turned away from the alternative child-care facilities.

State officials said the order closing the Echo Park center will remain in effect until an administrative law judge hears the case, probably in January. Officials said they will then seek to have the center’s license revoked for 14 months.

City officials ordered the immediate fingerprinting of 2,000 part-time workers in the Recreation and Parks Department after it was disclosed earlier this month that the two workers arrested on charges of child abuse did not have their backgrounds checked before they were hired. The disclosure touched off heated complaints from parents and from City Councilwoman Gloria Molina.

Goldfarb said the fingerprinting is to begin today at a Westside recreation facility. He said he did not know when the fingerprinting would be completed.

“We’re new at this,” Goldfarb said. “It’s going to be a big job, but we’re going to have to do it.”