Co-Op Nursery Schools’ Test of Faith : Day care: Many parent-run schools rely on churches for space, but they are being forced out so churches can run their own centers.

In a nursery school playroom in northwest Pasadena, Rick Hopper chuckles in approval as his 3-year-old son, David, slots the final piece into a jigsaw puzzle

For young David, it has always been a treat when his parents come to school. And Daddy is not complaining.

“He really gets excited when he knows one of us is going to be here,” said the 35-year-old financial planner, who has taken the morning off work for his twice-monthly tour of duty at the Altadena Parent Participation Nursery School where David plays two mornings a week.

“This gives me time to spend with him,” said Hopper, one of five parents responsible for mopping floors, supplying snacks and helping three professional teachers on a recent Tuesday.

But the parent-run co-op on the grounds of the First Lutheran Church soon may lose its home. The school, begun in Altadena 40 years ago, will have to close if it cannot find a new location by fall.

“We’re desperately trying to find a space,” said Sarah Craighead, president of the 50-student nursery that has been housed for five years in a peach-colored building with a red clay tile roof.

“We may just cease to exist if summer comes and we don’t have anything,” said Craighead, who, since learning the news in November, has sent letters to 28 churches in Pasadena and Altadena asking if anyone has room. “We’d consider meeting in a park.”

The church wants to set up its own preschool in the 2,500-square-foot building in an effort to attract new and younger parishioners to its shrinking 200-member congregation, Pastor Robert Faga said. The church collects $600 a month in rent from the nursery.

“We need to reach out to the people,” he said, pointing out that he would like to see tighter ties with parents and a greater emphasis on religious teaching.

“It’s now a secular school. We have no spiritual contact with (students’ families) at all,” Faga said. “We would like to be closer to them.”

But Altadena Nursery director and teacher Pat Hedland, 64, said staying nondenominational is important because she does not want to alienate anyone. The school celebrates Easter and Hanukkah as cultural events “so children don’t have to feel they’re different,” she explained.

“All of these things are important for children to know,” she continued. “We try not to limit ourselves.”

The dilemma of remaining religiously neutral in a church facility is not new to nursery schools on short-term leases. Last January the 48-student Diamond Bar Community Nursery School was asked to vacate its location at a church that wants to start its own day-care center next year.

A relocation committee of parents has contacted more than 60 churches in the vicinity--but so far no luck.

“It’s tough,” said Susie Roberts, a vice president of the school. “We had a very large mailing list, and the response was just nothing.”

Other complications are the Department of Social Services’ requirements on minimum space per child, bathroom accessibility and availability of drinking water in every room.

The 62-student Crescenta-Canada Nursery School met for three months in a park in 1988 before finding a new location in La Canada Flintridge. The Montrose church in which the nursery had been located for 30 years had wanted a hand in operating the school. “But we wanted it parent-run,” said school President Kathy Lockridge, explaining why they left.

Loss of a facility ranks among the schools’ top headaches, said Susan King, president of the 300-member California Council of Parent Participation Nursery Schools.

“Fifty percent of schools close because of the inability to find a new location,” King said, adding that about 10 schools in the state shut down each year. More than a third of the approximately 400 parent-participation nursery schools in the state lease space from churches.

Parent co-ops, which originated in Europe and were introduced to California in the 1920s, are required by the state Department of Social Services to maintain an adult-child ratio of 1 to 5, as opposed to the 1-to-12 teacher-child ratio required for traditional nurseries licensed by the state, King said.

Parents seem hooked on the concept.

Pamela Warrick, whose 3-year-old daughter attends Altadena Nursery, one of 12 such co-ops in the San Gabriel Valley, said the warm atmosphere at the school makes her feel as if she is with family.

“We trust and we know one another, and it’s so much fun,” she said, adding that she values the companionship of other parents, who help each other cope with discipline problems and with the isolation of being full-time mothers.

The experience also provides good on-the-job training in parenting. “You see how other people that don’t have blood relations to these urchins deal with them,” she said with a laugh.

Parents, who pay between $48 and $96 a month, depending on how many days a week their child attends, also believe this kind of nursery school is safer.

“The idea of a co-op is real comforting for parents in the days of the McMartin trial and other horrible stories (of child abuse) in day care,” Warrick said. Child abuse would be “almost impossible here because all the parents are there,” she said.

About 65 parents and grandparents, most of them women, are rotated on duty rosters at the school.

More than half of them are working parents. They are also enthusiastic about having a say in running the school.

“It’s a lot of trouble, but it’s worth it,” said Mary Lou Byrne, an attorney who takes mornings off twice a month to work with the 2- to 4-year-olds. “It eases your guilt somehow,” she said about being able to spend more time with her son.

Although her toddler was not too perturbed when told about having to leave the facility, she thinks he might become more concerned as the day draws closer.

“For a 3-year-old, nine months is a zillion years away,” Byrne said. But, she added, “the parents are terribly upset.”

Hedland, who has seen the school through two moves in the 30 years she has been affiliated with it as mother and teacher, said she is determined to find a way for Altadena Nursery School to stay afloat.

“This school is too wonderful,” she said, promising that she will not let the children go without a struggle. “I’ll take them home with me if I have to.”