A Close-Up Look At People Who Matter : Nursery Tries to Take Care of Parents Too

Her job description may be to oversee the care of 36 children from low-income families, but Jackie Tomasik sees her duties as much more.

“I have to take care of their parents, too,” said Tomasik, director for the Assistance League Day Nursery in Lancaster. “They don’t have anyone else.”

Nearly all of her clients are single parents, many of them women who have recently left their husbands. They may come to Lancaster struggling to support their small children, drawn by the promise of affordable housing and a chance to make a better life for themselves.

Then, they find out how tough it really is.

“They come in at the end of their rope,” Tomasik said.

But Tomasik, 29, who appears to have inexhaustible energy, won’t let them give up the battle easily. In her nine years as the nursery director, she can count on the fingers of one hand the parents who have given up.

Tomasik encourages newcomers with the success stories of parents who have preceded them, such as a welfare mother of four who graduated last year as an honor student in the nursing program at Antelope Valley College. That woman had wanted to quit three times, but Tomasik and her staff at the nursery talked her out of it. Others have been able to go on to four-year universities and even to graduate school.

Run by the Assistance League of Antelope Valley, the day nursery was opened in 1959 before the population in Lancaster and Palmdale boomed because of the aerospace industry.

Child care at the facility is not free but is provided on a sliding scale according to the parent’s ability to pay. Parents with incomes of less than $1,500 a month can enroll their children ages 2 to 5 in the low-cost child care program.

The children are dropped off as early as 6:30 a.m. by some parents. They can stay at the nursery as late as 5:30 p.m.

Driven by the influx of people into the community and a poor economy, the nursery’s waiting list jumped to 200 children two years ago and has stayed there.

“We never had a waiting list like we have now,” said Donna Temeer, president of the league, which is about to start a $300,000 fund-raising campaign to build a larger facility for as many as 72 children.

The league also is planning to open a thrift shop to support a larger program. The organization is a 1994 winner of a $5,000 Community Partnership Award given by the Los Angeles Times Valley Edition for its efforts.

The larger facility will be quite a contrast from the nursery where Stephanie Slater started doing volunteer work in the early 1960s.

‘It was a beautiful town at that time, you knew people,” Slater said of the Antelope Valley, remembering the community’s alfalfa farming and sheepherding roots. Then, the nursery was used mostly to care for children of nurses at Antelope Valley Hospital, she said.

Over the years, the nursery has changed from an all-volunteer organization with a limited clientele, to a staff-run program serving low-income families. Volunteers--99 of them--still help out with staffing, as well as fund raising.

Tomasik works hard to befriend parents and gets to know them well. Often, she is their only friend in a new town.

“I’m someone who really likes to talk to them and who tries to be friendly,” Tomasik said.

But the pressure of a long waiting list takes its toll, and necessity sometimes forces Tomasik to be firm when a parent appears to be taking advantage of the program. Lying about economical circumstances could be grounds for her to throw a parent out of the program.

“As the years go by, I’m getting a little bit more mean,” she said.

One in an occasional series in the Personal Best column featuring winners of 1994 Los Angeles Times Community Partnership Awards. Personal Best is a weekly profile of an ordinary person who does extraordinary things. Please address prospective candidates to Personal Best, Los Angeles Times, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth, 91311. Or fax them to (818) 772-3338