Who Will Watch the Kids?

Edelmira Sanchez remembers when her stomach was always in knots. Reeling from a painful divorce, she worked two jobs just to put milk and cold cereal on the table.

And there was one never-ending concern: Who would take care of her two preschool-age children while she worked from dawn into the night? When Sanchez discovered a center near her Cudahy home where she qualified for free child care, many of her problems began to dissolve.

A few miles away in Bell Gardens, Salvador Luna is preoccupied with what to do with his two young sons. On welfare and under pressure to find a job, Luna has an additional worry: Alex, 7, and Martin, 5, have hearing disabilities that few child care centers can accommodate.

Parents like Sanchez, who have low-paying jobs, and Luna, who are trying to get off welfare, find themselves at the core of one of the most important challenges facing localities in the wake of welfare reform: how to ensure the availability of affordable child care.

California must put more than 500,000 welfare recipients to work over the next few years. More than 60% of them are single parents with at least one child under 5.

Providing care for that many children while their parents work, experts say, will require a huge increase in the number of available child care spaces, whether they are provided by individual baby sitters, licensed family homes, preschools or centers.

Those parents will qualify for federally or state-subsidized child care. The demand for subsidized child care is expected to surge, placing new burdens on an already strapped, uneven system in which working-class and even middle-class families may have a hard time finding openings for their youngsters where they live.

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The number of licensed care providers cannot be increased quickly enough to meet the demand, experts fear. Welfare recipients, they say, will probably be shut out of higher-quality care in licensed centers and forced more and more to rely on unlicensed baby sitters or relatives.

Although some parents may prefer to leave their children with a relative, many more would choose licensed facilities if they had an option, child care experts say.

Using unlicensed care “should be a well-informed parental decision and not something decided on by default,” said Susan Fogel, legal director at the California Women’s Law Center. “There are huge disparities, and capacity has to increase in all areas, or there are real concerns about what the picture will look like down the road.”

In no area of the state are differences in the availability of licensed child care more striking than Los Angeles County, say Fogel and other experts.

Affluent parents are twice as likely to find licensed preschool or child care slots in their communities than those residing in poor neighborhoods. And children living in largely Latino communities are far less likely than others to face a range of child care options.

President Clinton in his State of the Union address acknowledged that there will be increased demands for subsidized child care and proposed a $21.7-billion initiative that would expand child care tax credits for the middle class and subsidies for low-income families.

Yet, for all of its importance and the critical role child care must play in moving people from welfare to work, experts contend that little effort has been made to coordinate planning or ensure a greater geographic dispersal of licensed child care openings.

The disparity between demand and availability is striking in the 90201 ZIP Code, which covers the working-class communities of Bell, Bell Gardens and Cudahy, southeast of downtown Los Angeles. Nearly 24,000 children under 10 live in the area, 40%, or 9,600, of them in households on welfare. Yet there are fewer than 500 licensed child care openings.

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Welfare recipients must find work within two years and can receive aid for no longer than five years during their lifetime. However, the 1996 welfare overhaul exempts parents who cannot find suitable child care from the work requirements.

Luna, 44, has been looking for child care more than two years, since long before welfare reform became a reality. None of the centers he contacted were equipped to care for children with special needs like Alex or Martin.

“When I talked to providers, they said it was impossible,” he recalled. “As much as they want to, they can’t, because they have to care for the other kids.”

He put his boys’ names on a waiting list for a Huntington Park center, heard nothing for eight months and finally gave up. His father tries to help but cannot provide full-time care for the boys, nor can a sister who is looking for a job of her own.

When Luna applied again this November for child care at a nearby agency, he was told he might have to wait six to eight months. There are about 100 families ahead of him.

Luna has three options: place his children in a licensed child care center, opt for a licensed family child-care home or find a relative or neighbor to care for them.

“I would rather have them in a center, because they would teach them more things,” he said. “If they are in someone’s home, they probably will only sit in front of the television.”

The boys go to Cudahy’s Park Avenue School, which has classes that can accommodate handicapped students. Alex and Martin miss school at least once and sometimes several times each month to see doctors, appointments that complicate Luna’s child care arrangements and his job hunt, he said.

He has held good jobs before but says he understands the needs of his employers and why he would be let go. He said he was cast into the role of mother and father nearly six years ago when his wife became addicted to drugs.

Luna is about to start a computer training course at Bell Gardens High School and has talked to a neighborhood woman about baby-sitting. Because he is in the county’s welfare-to-work program, he automatically qualifies for a subsidy to pay for the baby sitter, but he has abandoned hope that he can find a licensed center for them.

“I guess there are a lot of changes coming about, though I haven’t seen them yet,” Luna said. “But I sure hope they benefit not only the parents, but the children.”

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At Montebello’s Mexican American Opportunity Foundation, child care administrator Aura Zapata is preparing to hire more people to serve thousands of anticipated new clients like Luna.

She whips out a bundle of papers--a waiting list with more than 1,100 names on it. Families are ranked according to income and size. The poorest and largest go to the top of the list and may leap over families that have been waiting for months.

The nonprofit foundation is the child care resource and referral agency to which Luna has turned. It is one of 10 such privately run nonprofit groups coordinating child care services in the county. They serve families from all income levels but are increasingly burdened with rising demands for subsidized child care.

“We especially need more facilities for licensed care,” said Zapata. “The centers have more educational opportunities, and we know the first years are the formative ones and are so important.”

Next to jobs, child care is perhaps the most important component in the unprecedented effort to move thousands of California welfare recipients from dependence to self-sufficiency.

And perhaps no element of CalWORKS--the state’s new welfare program designed to implement federal legislation--is being more welcomed and more scrutinized than the dramatically restructured system of subsidized child care.

Subsidized care is guaranteed for CalWORKS children through age 10. That care is allowed for children 11 and 12 if funding is available, and will also be provided for children 13 and over who are physically or mentally incapacitated.

In Los Angeles County, resource and referral agencies like Zapata’s administer the program.

Child care is free for all families earning less than 50% of the state median income of about $3,700 a month for a family of four. With earnings of 75% of the median income, a family no longer qualifies for federal subsidies. But a state-funded program will subsidize care for these families as long as their income is below the state median.

Under the current fee schedule, a family of four earning half the state median income would pay $2 per child per day for full-time care and $1 per child for part-time.

Funding is the continuing worry, Zapata said. The 1996 federal welfare overhaul consolidated money for subsidized child care programs into a single block grant for each state and raised federal funding overall to more than $3 billion annually.

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Zapata will receive an undetermined set amount each year for subsidies. But if those funds are not enough to meet her agency’s needs, more parents and their children will have to wait.

Many experts fear that welfare recipients, with their guarantee of subsidized care, will push low-income non-welfare families to the sidelines in a headlong competition for spaces, acknowledged Zapata, who hopes that does not happen.

Within its service area, which stretches from Lincoln Heights to Santa Fe Springs, the foundation operates nine day care centers, including two in Bell Gardens. One is a preschool with a few openings in an early morning class. The other has 74 spaces and a waiting list.

Even in an area such as 90201 with a shortage of spaces, there are vacancies because parents may want to place their children near their jobs, or they may need infant or after-hours care, Zapata said.

But those few vacancies won’t begin to meet the anticipated need. Finding the facilities for a new center and getting it licensed can be a lengthy process, and many child care experts question whether the existing system will be able to absorb the expected influx of CalWORKS children.

“Even if you get the funding, it doesn’t really matter, if there are no places to put the children,” Zapata said.

How much the capacity for licensed child care needs to grow is difficult to determine, officials say, because no one knows if parents who now use relatives and friends will consider putting their children in licensed facilities.

“The truth is we don’t know what the need will be and where it will be,” said Kathy Malesku-Samu, who coordinates child care programs for the county.

Only about one in three welfare recipients who report earned income requests subsidized child care, county welfare officials say. Slightly more than half of the children in welfare families are cared for by relatives or neighbors who do not need to be licensed.

Critics complain, however, that the county has done too little to explain child care options to parents--especially those who traditionally turn to relatives. Millions of dollars in child care funds have gone unspent in the past because eligible children were not enrolled in programs, county officials conceded.

In 90201, there are only 15 licensed family child care homes.

Zapata’s agency can provide technical assistance for those seeking a license, and the group even has a lending library for new providers with items such as toys, books in English and Spanish, floor mats, tricycles, pint-sized tables, chairs and musical instruments.

But as yet, there has been no flood of prospective providers knocking on her doors, Zapata said.

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Sanchez feels like the child care system is working for her.

Three years ago her weight had dropped to 90 pounds and she ended up in a hospital because of stress. Alone with three children after her divorce, she had just learned from the Internal Revenue Service that she was liable for $8,000 in back taxes owed by her ex-husband, an antique refinisher.

She had not been able to afford an attorney for her divorce and ended up with no alimony or support for her children, George, 15, Luis, 6, and Natalie, 5.

She was paying her sitter $125 a week, working two jobs and wondering if she would have to send her children to her mother in Mexico.

“I told myself I couldn’t make it anymore, that I should not be alive,” she said. “It was so hard, because I would watch them sleeping, and I knew I couldn’t do it.”

A co-worker suggested that Sanchez call a few child care centers. After half a day dialing numbers, she found one in Bell Gardens run by Zapata’s group.

“I was making $8.50 an hour and paying $700 in rent,” she said. “When I called, I prayed that I would qualify.”

Sanchez qualified for fully subsidized care. She was able to use the $500 a month she had spent on a baby sitter to buy more nutritious food and some new clothes for the children. The center had an immediate impact on Luis and Natalie.

“When I put my kids there, they started developing physically and emotionally,” she said. “There was a very positive attitude on the part of the teachers.”

But as Luis and Natalie have grown older, their child care needs have changed and Sanchez must now juggle child care with school and work. Natalie, as Luis had before, recently left the child care center to attend kindergarten.

Now Sanchez has decided that it is most convenient to have her sister baby-sit the children.

Sanchez gets a subsidized voucher for Luis’ care and has applied for a subsidy for Natalie’s. With her child care needs fairly stable, Sanchez wants to become a child development specialist. “I was very lucky,” she said. “I don’t know what I would have done without getting care I could afford.”