NORTH HILLS : Child-Care Center at School Faces Delays

It’s been a rough road to child care at Monroe High School.

Nearly a year after the school received a $68,000 grant to launch a day-care center for the children of teen-age mothers, the school has yet to receive the most important component of the project: a building.

Tangled in bureaucratic delays, a portable building that the school district bought from Long Beach Unified School District for $1 still sits at an elementary school there, slated for demolition.

The districts agreed to the deal in March, but the move was stalled by a series of mix-ups in the permitting process necessary to haul the 22-foot-high building from Long Beach to the Monroe campus in North Hills.

Monroe Principal Joan Elam said she had hoped to have the center open by the fall to serve some of the estimated 140 teen-agers in the area who have children, about 45 of whom are enrolled at Monroe.

“I’ve got a lot of kids with kids,” Elam said. “This is a real need at Monroe. Hopefully we’ll see a light at the end of the tunnel.”

The Los Angeles Unified School District hired a contractor to move the portable building, but the permits to transfer the building were not properly completed, according to Jim Samples, deputy director of maintenance for LAUSD. The building is blocking construction plans at the Long Beach school.

“We were supposed to move it Monday night. Our people were ready to make the move,” Samples said. “We’re frustrated.”

When it finally opens, the child-care center at Monroe will serve about 50 children ages 6 weeks to 5 years, as well as offer training classes for parents. The original grant for the center came from the YMCA, but Elam said she is trying to identify other funding sources.

She said she hopes that accommodating such young babies will encourage teen-age mothers to return to school sooner.

“We could certainly improve our odds,” she said. “If you start at 2 (years old), some may come back. But they get discouraged.”