Workplace Realities Increase Demand for Off-Hours Child Care

If you ask Peggy Nairn about providing child care services at 4 or 6 or 10, you have to be specific.

“Is that a.m. or p.m.?” responded Nairn, the younger half of a mother-daughter team that offers around-the-clock child care at two North Hills homes for dozens of youngsters.

The 24-hour family child care homes operated by Nairn and her mother, Penny Nairn, are constantly abuzz with children in motion. In the wee hours, small children are picked up or dropped off by late-shift parents, many of whom hold down two jobs or work and go to school.

“I just look at these people and my heart goes out to them,” said Peggy Nairn, who got into the child care business in 1984. “They’re going to school and working all these crazy hours. And they’re just doing it. They’re getting it done.”

The Nairn homes form the “odd-hours” link in a child care network established this year by Los Angeles Mission College in Sylmar. Using a $514,000 grant from the state, the college’s Family Child Care Homes Network provides low-income parents with access to subsidized child care at licensed homes in the San Fernando Valley.

The effort is one of several efforts in Los Angeles County and the state to take into consideration the new reality of the workplace--that not even bankers work banker hours anymore.

“The economy has become increasingly a 24-hour economy, and the child care available has not kept pace with the economy,” said Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Feuer.

At Feuer’s urging, a city commission has studied the issue of odd-hours care and is expected to recommend in October that a pilot program be launched to provide such care at a public school.

“This is just such a large need,” Feuer said. “It’s a societal need that all of us parents can relate to.”

One of the largest efforts to expand off-hours care is being undertaken by scores of organizations, public and private, across the state under Department of Education grants, similar to the one received by Mission College.

Terry Miller, an analyst with the state’s Child Development Division, said that about $17.7 million was awarded this year to 26 agencies in Los Angeles County that promised, in part, to offer care during nontraditional hours.

The largest single grant, nearly $7 million, went to the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Providing funds to groups that would offer odd-hours care was part of the criterion the state education department categorized as “priority one.”

“We know that parents trying to obtain care during nontraditional hours are having a very difficult time,” Miller said. “So this is an incentive to expand the programs to meet the needs of those parents.”

The issue of after-hours care, faced for years by many middle- and upper-income parents working long hours, has taken on a new urgency for large numbers of lower-income parents being pushed into the labor pool by welfare reform, child care advocates said.

Many parents are finding that the most readily available jobs carry hours that don’t match those of most child care centers.

In addition, to the extent that after-hours care was available, it often was too costly for those struggling to get by on minimum wage.

“I had parents here and they were paying almost everything they were earning just to keep their children here,” said Peggy Nairn, who charges about $540 per month for full-time care. “So they were able to get on this program, and now the payment comes through Mission College.”

To be eligible for a full subsidy under the state program, parents must earn less than 50% of the state median income. That’s $2,090 in gross monthly income for a family of four. The program is available at varying costs for parents making between 50% and 75% of the state median figure.

The program is aimed at parents whose children are under age 3 and who live in areas where subsidized child care is not readily available.

Some grant recipients, such as Mission College, Cal State Northridge and the Child Care Resource Center, are using the funds to create a child care network--a bank of providers from which parents can pick. The recipients screen parents for income eligibility, and select and pay the service providers.

But Miller said most of the grants went directly to child care centers--the segment of the childcare industry that thus far has been least responsive to the need for care at odd hours.

In the San Fernando, Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys, there are an estimated 85 licensed homes offering 24-hour care, based on listings in a database maintained by the Child Care Resource Center. The database listed no centers offering 24-hour care, according to Patricia Koesler, a senior manager with the resource center.

Koesler counted 340 child care homes in the same region that offer care either before 6 a.m. or after 6 p.m. but only 32 centers offering similar care.

Of the 15 family child care homes serving children in the Mission College program, only the Nairns offer 24-hour care.

Sheri Senter, chief executive of the Fountain Valley-based childcare chain NPSS, which operates eight centers in Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties, said more centers have not expanded their hours because of the cost.

The state requires centers--but not homes--to keep children of different ages separate and maintain strict staff-to-child ratios that vary depending on the children’s ages. For example, an infant and a 4-year-old equal at least two staffers at a child care center.

Given licensing requirements, most centers probably will not rush to offer off-hours care, Senter said.

“Where you’re going to see a change is in family day-care homes,” she said. She noted that during a Long Beach training session held in July for would-be home providers, “there was a definite interest in being open either all night or until 11:30 p.m.

“That’s the trend I’m seeing.”

One approach, expected to be proposed at a meeting Oct. 14 of the city’s Arts, Health and Humanities Committee, which Feuer chairs, would bring expanded-hours care to a program already run by L.A. Unified.

The school district plans to use some of its state grant money to add nine sites to the six that offer child care services.

Rochelle Ventura, Feuer’s chief field deputy, said the city’s Commission for Children, Youth and Their Families will recommend using one of those sites to offer care as late as 10 p.m. during the week and on weekends.

“We know that the retail stores are going more and more to late hours,” said Ventura, who called care during nontraditional hours “a very hot issue in Sacramento.”

“We want to take one site and expand the hours so that people can work at the jobs that are available.”