Firms, Centers Form Partnerships

Behind a sheet of plastic, where her office once stood, Brenda Lopez’s dream of a modern kitchen for the child-care center she directs in the city’s Visitacion Valley is finally coming true.

For nearly three decades, the Visitacion Valley Family School, which serves 210 children at two sites, has made do with a kitchen so small that its two cooks sometimes trip over each other. They turn out 600 meals a day without benefit of a dishwasher, adequate ventilation or more than a couple of feet of counter space.

Now, a city initiative pairing private companies with child-care centers in low-income neighborhoods is changing all that. This month, Morse Diesel International, a construction company, began building a kitchen that will be three times the size of the family center’s current one. Morse Diesel is putting up the entire construction cost of $50,000 to $100,000.

It is the willingness to innovate, coupled with the city’s compact size and history of grass-roots activism, that accounts for San Francisco’s relatively high number of available child-care slots compared to Southern California, child-care advocates say.

A recent study by UC Berkeley and Stanford researchers said that parents in San Francisco and other Bay Area counties have twice as many preschool and child-care slots available as parents in Los Angeles.

Across San Francisco this spring, child-care centers such as the one in Visitacion Valley are being renovated, spruced up, expanded and reequipped by more than a dozen private companies as part of the adopt-a-child-care-center initiative Mayor Willie Brown launched this year.

The program is just one effort of many that the city is making to add 1,000 slots to its existing stock of 15,371 places at preschool and child-care centers by 2000.

The city has allocated $2 million from its general fund this year to pay for mental health counseling and training for child-care providers.

It has also created a child-care facilities fund, together with private corporations and philanthropic foundations, that provides grants and low-interest loans for expanding and rehabilitating child-care centers.

San Francisco is also designing a central child-care waiting list for parents who now must go from center to center, putting their names on multiple lists in hopes that a spot will open somewhere.

And this summer, Brown will open City Hall’s first on-site child-care center, a city-subsidized facility that will be run by a private, nonprofit child-care provider and serve 42 children of city employees and low-income families.

All this does not make San Francisco nirvana for harried parents seeking quality child care, city officials and child-care advocates caution.

Policy Analysis for California Education, the authors of the study on the availability of child care across the state, say that even in San Francisco, the distribution of slots is skewed. Far more slots are available in high-priced centers in wealthy neighborhoods than in subsidized centers in low-income neighborhoods where the need is greatest.

In fact, about 6,000 children are on waiting lists for a spot in one of the city’s subsidized child-care centers, said Fran Kipnis, the child-care coordinator in the mayor’s office.

At Lopez’s subsidized center, about 400 children are on the waiting list.

“We get parents in tears,” Lopez said. “They come here and learn we have a waiting list and they’ve already been to five other places. Sometimes they are on 10 waiting lists. They have no options.”

The need for subsidized slots is expected to grow, city officials said, as welfare reforms push more parents into job training and the work force.

“Even if some report is showing that there is more care here than there is in Los Angeles, the truth is, we are grappling with capacity problems ourselves,” said Michele Rutherford, child-care coordinator with the city’s Department of Human Services. “If other counties have a lower ratio of centers to kids than we do, than they are really in trouble.”