Care Center Not Likely to Reopen

Parents protesting the city’s closure of a popular after-school child care center learned from City Council members this week that there is little hope for reviving the program.

Parents received a letter earlier this month stating that the 6-year-old Kids’ Time Club program run by the Recreation Department will close because the building in which it is housed does not meet state standards for the number of youngsters enrolled.

“It’s very sad. It’s absolutely impossible now for me to find child care,” single parent Amy Thomas told council members. Without the program, Thomas said, she will be forced to move from the city because the two remaining programs in Seal Beach are too costly.

“I’m going to have to pay more than twice the amount to keep my child in after-school care,” Thomas said.

Parents paid a flat fee of $125 a month for after-school care, compared with fees of more than $200 a month at the other two after-school programs in the city.

The program’s enrollment had grown by 50% in the last three years to a total of 50 children during the last school year.

Mayor Gwen Forsythe said the city would have to spend at least $70,000 to install a fence 6 feet high, private bathrooms and a separate kitchen, and hire credentialed staff members, all required by the state for facilities serving so many children.

“I’ve been told that we were going to be cited in September, and that [state officials] would have shut us down anyway,” Forsythe said. “The city does not have the funds to go ahead and do the work.”