Parents Fear Budget Woes Spell Doom for Childrens Center

From the outside, it’s hard to understand how anyone could care much for the beige, World War II-era bungalow that houses the Childrens Center in Hawthorne.

But to the needy parents of the 60 or so children enrolled there, the state-subsidized preschool is a godsend.

“Once you get past the drab exterior, inside it is a very special place,” said Cheryl Castaneda, a single mother with a 3-year-old son in the program. “The kids know they’re loved there and they feel at home.”

A former waitress who is studying forensic identification at El Camino Community College, Castaneda says that without the program she would have been forced to drop out of school to care for her son.

She is now one of dozens of parents panicked by news that the Hawthorne School District, which helps support the program, may drop its contract with the state when it comes up for renewal in June. The district, which is facing severe budget problems, says it can’t afford the $58,000 it spent last year to help keep the center afloat.

District officials say they want the preschool to stay open and are considering ways to cut costs at the center--either by reducing staff or by contracting with a program like Head Start to offer similar services. The trustees could make a decision as early as Wednesday.

But parents with children at the center are worried that the program they have come to know and love won’t survive.

“It’s really a wonderful place,” Castaneda said. “I know the kids are well taken care of. The staff is really caring and they’re teaching (my son) a lot. . . . It would be awful if it closed.”

The Childrens Center on Washington Street is a state-funded program run by the school district that provides meals and a rich educational program designed to prepare children between the ages of 3 and 5 for kindergarten. Boxes of colorful building blocks and toys are neatly arranged in playrooms decorated with posters and children’s artwork. As a group of children repeat their ABCs, others speed around the back yard on tricycles or play in the sandbox.

Most of the Childrens Center’s parents work or attend school during the day and only the most needy families are eligible for a slot at the preschool, which has a sliding fee scale and more than 100 children on the waiting list.

To qualify, a family of four must earn no more than $2,639 a month, or less than 84% of the state’s median income. Most of the center’s parents earn far less than that, with the vast majority paying nothing or about $1 a day per child for the service, said head teacher Wanda Brown.

Most private child care in the area costs at least $75 a week, parents said.

The Hawthorne center, which opened in 1944, was one of several state-run child-care programs developed during World War II.

Started as a cooperative between the Hawthorne School District, the Parent Teacher Assn. and local state legislators, the Hawthorne center originally was built to serve children whose fathers were at war and whose mothers were employed as nurses, teachers and factory workers, said John Andersen, school board president .

Like other child-care centers built then, the Hawthorne center was supposed to be self-supporting, paid for with state funds and parent contributions.

But the costs of running the program began exceeding the state allocation and the Hawthorne School District has made up the difference.

Last year, the district contributed about $58,000 to support the program and the state spent more than $225,000. About $31,000 of the district’s costs went to supplement salaries of center workers. The other $27,000 is an estimate of what the district could receive if it stopped providing the building to the state for free and leased it to another agency.

If the district decides to contract with Head Start, for example, it would receive lease income for the building, district officials said.

Trustees have been concerned for years about how much the center was costing the district, but it wasn’t until last October--soon after the entire 7,000-student district went on a year-round schedule to ease overcrowding--that the trustees decided they could no longer afford to help support the program, Andersen said.

Because the center now receives the state’s maximum funding, there’s no chance that the state will step in to pay the expenses picked up by the district.

“This program is not part of the instructional program that the district has a mandate to maintain,” said Don Carrington, assistant superintendent of educational instruction. “We have done this to assist the parents in the community for many years. But with the financial situation the way it is, the hard facts are we have to take a look at what options we have.”

The costs of converting to a year-round program have strained the budget so much this year that district employees probably will not receive any raises, Carrington said. Teachers already have been asked to cut back on supplies.

Last week, he and other district officials met with the center’s four teachers and 13 instructional aides to discuss the center’s future.

Although district officials assured them that another agency would step in to serve the children, parents and teachers assumed the worst.

Parents distributed flyers urging attendance at the school board’s Feb. 12 meeting “to discuss the possible closure of this center.” And teachers began to complain about a lack of appreciation from district administrators.

Carol Lidell, a teacher at the center for the past 22 years, said it would be shortsighted of the district to target the center in its attempt to cut costs.

“We’ve always been the stepchildren here,” Lidell said. “If it wasn’t for the teachers buying stuff with their own money, we wouldn’t have anything here. . . . In this area there’s a great need for this project, and if they did away with it, it would be a grave injustice.”

But Supt. Christa Metzger insists closing the center was never an option, and described the fears of both teachers and parents as unjustified.

“The overreaction to this whole thing has been astounding,” Metzger said angrily. “We’re not talking about closing the center. . . . All we are trying to do is what the original intent of the board was, and that is to make the center self-supporting.”

One of the options under consideration, she said, is for the district to lease the center to Head Start, a preschool program for low-income children funded by the state and federal governments.

Unlike the Childrens Center, which is open from 6:45 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. weekdays, Head Start runs a four-hour program that requires parents to work as volunteers several hours a week.

Officials from both Head Start and the school district are discussing possible arrangements in which the district may provide child care before and after the Head Start classes. Head Start officials also say they would allow parents to take work home instead of requiring them to volunteer at the center.

And because the two programs operate on the same educational model, it is likely that at least some of the Childrens Center’s employees could get a job with Head Start.

“This is a new concept, but we’re willing to try it,” said Marguerita Townsend, project director of Federation of Preschools, a federal and state run agency that runs Head Start in the South Bay area.

Another cost-cutting option being considered is to reduce the staff size of the Childrens Center, Metzger said. If the district could significantly cut its costs under this scenario, the center could continue to operate as it has for the past 48 years, she said.

“We are very well-staffed, by more than we have to be by law,” Metzger said. “If there were any kind of staff changes, like someone retiring, that might allow us to cut costs enough to keep the program.”

Hawthorne Childrens Center * Provides preschool and day care for 60 low-income children ages 3 to 5.

* Is funded by the state and the Hawthorne School District, though support from the district is now in jeopardy.

* Opened in 1944 to give mothers a place to leave their children while they worked and their husbands fought in World War II.