Money Issues Hamper Quality Child Care for Most

Re “Who’s Minding the Kids?” (Jan. 10): As chairman of the scholarship committee of the Growing Place, the nonprofit preschool attended by Eduardo Labarthe in your story, I repeatedly observe the financial burden of child care on families. I also observe how terribly limited scholarship funds are.

At the Growing Place, 18 of about 70 children receive some amount of financial aid to help them meet the $610 monthly tuition. The money for our scholarship fund does not come from federal, state or local government sources. It comes from private donations and fund-raising events. We hold an annual carnival and silent auction. We have an annual giving campaign. And we sell lots of T-shirts.

Once the money has been raised, the board of directors must make the very difficult decisions as to whether we use the money to make day care more affordable through scholarships, or whether we use it to improve the quality of the early childhood education our children receive.

We believe that making scholarships available to those needing financial aid is part of our responsibility to the community. We strive to find the proper balance. But the facts are that money is very limited, that in this time of budget cuts governments will not change that, and that the private sector will have to make a much greater commitment if quality child care is to become affordable as we all would like.

CHRIS FOLEY

Pacific Palisades

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One component was conspicuously absent in your otherwise excellent analysis of the child-care dilemma--the needs of child-care workers.

Early childhood teachers with their substandard salaries and inadequate benefits are in effect subsidizing parents in programs that charge only $85 a week, the mean rate quoted for preschools. Quality programs, which pay teachers enough to prevent turnover, cost at least $140 a week, which is still only $2.67 an hour for a 10-hour day.

Until the whole society decides to become cost-effective and puts adequate money--whether employer funds, government subsidies or tuition from parents--into early education, we will all be paying for much more costly things like remedial classes and prisons.

Teachers in child care cannot continue alone to fund the whole community’s responsibility for our future--young children.

ELLEN W. KHOKHA, Director

The Growing Place

Santa Monica