In Day-Care Economics, $6 a Week Is a Fortune
Six bucks a week.
What’s pocket change to a lot of folks is a dilemma for Joe Viola, finance manager for the Altadena Christian Children’s Center (ACCC). He figures preschool tuition at the nonprofit child-care center must rise from $136 to $142 a week to finance cost-of-living raises for teachers this fall.
The boost will barely keep the staff ahead of inflation. Still, Viola knows it will strain the finances of some of the center’s working families. If even a handful withdraw their kids for less expensive care, he’ll be hard pressed to balance the books.
Welcome to the high-wire act of child-care economics. Much of the child-care debate has focused on the low wages paid to caregivers, or on parents’ inability to find decent, affordable care. ACCC represents the struggle of institutions caught in the middle, under pressure to deliver quality care and living wages without bankrupting families in the process.
How do you go about providing one of the most important services on the planet for less than $3 an hour? A peek inside ACCC reveals a dedicated staff, a supportive church partner, a shoestring budget and the relentless pursuit of outside funds to subsidize the true cost of quality care.
Founded in 1982 by the Altadena Baptist Church, ACCC is now a separate nonprofit entity serving 55 preschoolers in a facility adjacent to the church. It also provides after-school programs for 70 students from kindergarten through sixth grade at two nearby schools.
About 10% of the center’s preschool slots are funded with state welfare-to-work money. ACCC helps other low-income families with need-based scholarships raised from outside sources. But most of the center’s families pay their own way. They are a mixture of single-parent, two-earner, middle-class and working households for whom child care ranks among their biggest expenses.
Wedged into a tight space behind the church parking lot, the center consists of little more than three tiny houses, a small garden and a playground. But the modest facilities haven’t prevented the center from obtaining accreditation from the National Assn. for the Education of Young Children, a sort of Good Housekeeping seal of quality in the child-care industry.
Parking Attendants Earn a Higher Wage
Experts have argued for years over what “quality” child care means. But most agree it starts with experienced providers teaching meaningful skills to small groups of children. That, of course, means higher staffing expenses, which are at the heart of the quality-cost battle.
Although California law allows one adult to supervise as many as 12 preschoolers, ACCC has established a 1:5 ratio for its youngest children and a maximum of 1:9 for its older charges.
“It’s really about making an investment in the children,” said Anne Chaney, assistant director of ACCC. “A teacher with 12 [young] children can barely keep up with the diapering. Children need more interaction with an adult.”
ACCC also pays a little better than many comparable child-care centers. The average child-care worker in this country makes $7.03 an hour, a little less than a parking-lot attendant. ACCC’s pay scale ranges from $7.50 to $12 an hour. Although not exactly lofty, those wages have allowed the center to retain some college-educated caregivers in a field known for its low-skilled help and high turnover. Staff salaries and benefits alone chewed up 80% of the $507,000 the center took in last year in tuition and fees.
That means higher tuition for parents. The center’s current preschool tuition of $136 a week works out to about $2.47 an hour for a 55-hour week, far less per hour than most baby-sitters charge. But that rate is nearly 46% higher than the $93.42 weekly average for Los Angeles County.
To jack tuition much higher would undoubtedly force some parents to look for less expensive care. That’s a scary proposition for ACCC, considering that each vacant full-time preschool slot represents an annualized loss of more than $7,000. So ACCC, like other nonprofit centers, finds itself stuck on a fund-raising treadmill--scrambling for grants, staging benefits, begging corporations and wooing volunteers. It’s a year-round grind that many directors find frustrating, considering they went into this field to work with children, not numbers.
“They’d rather be planning curriculum” than a rummage sale, said Toni Boucher, executive director of ACCC. “Most directors and administrators have no background in management or finance.”
Indeed, when the center started, ACCC was determined to serve a diverse ethnic and socioeconomic mix by providing care on a sliding scale. Low-income families were charged just $25 a week, subsidized by wealthier parents who paid $55 a week. It was a well-meaning idea but a financial flop. “Even a nonprofit has to run like a business,” Boucher said. “We knew we were going to have to change or we were going to lose the whole ship.”
That meant shifting to a flat-fee scale and hitting up the philanthropic community with a vengeance. Today the center gets funding from the United Way and the Pasadena Foundation, among others, to help with big capital projects and scholarships for low-income families.
Grants last year totaled around $75,000, including some city and county funds for the after-school program. But those dollars only stretch so far; ACCC has been forced to turn elsewhere.
Take the new office bathroom, for instance. It was built by a gaggle of retired Christian carpenters and plumbers who travel around the country donating their services. The computer in the cramped office was a castoff from a local business. ACCC’s Baptist Church landlord charges only $1 a year in rent. The center also holds prize drawings, hawks candy, sells scrip, hosts fund-raising dinners, even participates in a bridge tournament to scrape up extra cash.
A Patchwork Quilt of Financing
Industry watchers say such efforts have become standard practice nationwide. Federal and state governments have poured billions into child care over the last few years as part of their welfare-to-work efforts. But experts say that money has eased the burden only for the poorest American families. Thus the bake sales, raffles and garage sales continue. “It’s like dialing for dollars,” says Patty Siegel, executive director of the California Child Care Resource and Referral Network. “This patchwork quilt of financing is very fragile.”
Child-care activists are optimistic that Proposition 10, California’s new 50-cents-a-pack cigarette tax for children’s programs, will result in more day-care subsidies for the working poor. Likewise, they’re banking that proposed state legislation known as CARES--Compensation and Retention Encourage Stability--will eventually provide taxpayer-funded subsidies to boost wages, retention and training for the state’s child-care workers. In addition, the state is making $17 million in direct loans and loan guarantees available to child-care providers. All of which sounds good to Viola. But at the moment he’s more concerned with potential fallout from his $6 tuition hike. Will some families drop out? Can the center stay true to its mission of serving children of all income levels?
A lot is riding on six bucks a week.
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Seeking Care Outside the Home
* In 1995, 12.9 million U.S. infants, toddlers and preschoolers--fully 6 out of 10 children under age 6-- were in day care.
* Only 14% of U.S. children spend their first three years in the full-time care of a parent.
* Families making less than $14,400 a year spend 25% of their income on child care, compared with 6% for families making $54,000 or more.
* Californians pay an average of $103.77 a week to keep their preschool children in a day-care center.
* In California, there are 9,193 child-care centers with 558,862 spaces, and 30,880 family day-care providers with 259,605 spaces.
Sources: National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, California Child Care Resource & Referral Network.
For More Child Care Information
* An extensive list of child care resources and the complete Caring for Our Children series are available on The Times’ web site: https://latimes.com/caring
* Child Care Aware, a source on local child-care organizations. 800-424-2246.
https://www.naccrra.net/childcareaware/index.htm
* Child Care Action Campaign, 330 7th Avenue, 17th Floor, New York, NY 10001. 212-239-0138.
https://www.usakids.org/sites/ccac.html
Compiled by MALOY MOORE / Los Angeles Times
