The Price of Dedication

After nine years in her field, Julia Gonzales is a success by almost any measure. A college graduate with 24 postgraduate credits in her specialty, she supervises others, has achieved a state-approved leadership position and earns nearly as much as the highest paid professional in her category.

Yet, to make ends meet, the 27-year-old must shop in thrift stores, live with roommates and think twice before spending money for dinner out. She wouldn’t even have a car if her parents hadn’t paid for the dented Toyota Tercel she drives to work.

The problem? Gonzales chose a career in early childhood education, a profession as notoriously underpaid as it is increasingly considered crucial to the development of young children and the ability of parents to work.

Earning $20,000 a year at Altadena Christian Children’s Center, she makes half as much as friends who work as postal clerks or parking enforcement officers. Newspaper ads offer more to domestic cooks and dance hostesses. At an hourly rate, she could earn more delivering muffins.

Most employees of the day-care center work a second job, or live with parents or spouses who earn more than they do. Many move on to other professions. A recent report from the Washington, D.C.-based Center for the Child Care Workforce reports that while turnover rates are down, 20% of day-care centers in five major cities had lost at least half their staffs in the last year. According to the report, the typical day-care worker earns an annual salary of $12,800, while experienced teaching assistants are paid about $7 an hour and the most experienced teachers, like Gonzales, who make up a small segment of the child-care workers, make $10.85, tops.

Despite the struggle, Gonzales remains on the job because, as she said, “this is what I love to do. And I’m good at it.”

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Usually, Gonzales arrives for work at 7 a.m. to set up the classroom for the 2-year-olds. All the children’s art is framed, untouched, with mats and hung on the walls. Photos of each child’s family are prominently displayed close to the ground to ease their daily separation. Educational labels are placed by ordinary items in the room: Clock. Door. Cots. Each month, the themes of the dramatic play and science areas are changed, and the toys are rotated.

Children arrive and depart continually, depending on parents’ shifts and needs, as do volunteer parents and assistants. By 10:30, the room is a carousel of pounding, singing, reading, kissing, nursing, complaining and giggling, with Gonzales at the center patiently answering questions, changing diapers, noting on a clipboard a child’s developmental activities to share with parents later, and always teaching.

Time here is shredded into ribbons the length of a 2-year-old’s attention span and used by Gonzales to wrap a teacher’s intangible gifts: new vocabulary words to describe what the children see and feel, information about colors, math concepts, sex differences, what happens when a bug dies. However random their responses--”My daddy has a penis!” “I went to see Shamu!”--Gonzales approves and moves quickly on.

As lunchtime nears, Gonzales and the other teachers break into a song whose lyrics tell the children they have only a few more minutes to continue what they’re doing. It’s a gentle behavioral technique that aims to avoid harsher consequences for not following directions. The assistants sit on small chairs, making sure no one chokes on the macaroni, raisins or hot dogs, while Gonzales sets up the cots for nap time.

Shades drawn, soft music playing, the teachers rub backs and talk softly until, flushed and drowsy, the children fall asleep.

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For this, as well as consultations with parents and extra meetings with staff to plan the curriculum, Gonzales is paid about $10 an hour before taxes. Compared to her peers, she said, “I get paid very, very well.” The church-sponsored program can pay more than others partly because it operates rent-free and partly because its fees are slightly higher. Like most other child-care workers, she has no pension or retirement benefits, but unlike many others, she is offered health insurance.

She was selected as a state-qualified mentor teacher, offering on-the-job training to college students learning to become child-care workers. The program, which offers stipends from $300 to $1,000, was developed to maintain quality while easing teachers’ financial struggles.

Even so, Gonzales worries that her income won’t ever be enough to enable her to be independent or to purchase a home. She remembers one teacher at the school who had to move back home with her parents when she and her husband separated.

Care-giver pay, an old issue in the long-standing debate over the quality and stability of child care, has returned as welfare-to-work programs start sending more mothers into the work force and as newly synthesized research confirms the importance of early experiences on children’s brain development. The White House, Congress and the state of California are all preparing proposals that would address child-care quality, affordability and staffing.

For the first time, advocates are beginning to hope that society will finally view early childhood education as something more valuable than baby-sitting. Some improvement seems certain; they wonder only if it will be enough.

Gonzales said she’ll hang on to her job as long as she can. What keeps her going are the “daily moments” with children, the appreciation of parents and knowing she is making a difference in individual lives. Last year, she said, two children at the school told their parents they had been sexually molested by a friend of the family. She is sure they were spared further trauma because teachers at the center had instilled in them the necessity of speaking up when people touched them in ways they didn’t like.

Gonzales also takes special care in training future child-care workers, like Terra Chase, a 21-year-old student of early childhood education at Pasadena City College. Chase said teaching young children is “in her heart,” but how she will live is a “technical question” she hasn’t worked out yet.

When the issue of salary comes up, Gonzales said she treads a fine line between honesty and hope. Chase, like anyone going into the field, “needs to know what the reality is without being too discouraged.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Child-Care Pay in Perspective

A comparison of median hourly wages between child-care workers and other occupations.

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Family child-care provider: $3.37

Child-care worker: $6.12

Preschool teacher: $7.80

Parking lot attendant: $6.38

Data entry keyer: $8.50

Secretary: $10.61

Bus driver: $11.56

Flight attendant: $16.94

Kindergarten teacher: $19.16

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1996 figures