Orange County’s Child-Care Plan Has Statewide Impact

Orange County’s decision to close its child-care centers for low-income families and turn them over to private operators prompted directors of similar programs across the state to form a lobby to stop the same thing from happening elsewhere.

Unless the state puts more money into quality child care, other school districts and county offices of education will have to abandon their programs too, said Frances Oda, director of child development services for the Sacramento City Unified School District.

“We’re looking at this as a true wake-up call,” Oda said. “We need to be very serious and deliberate.”

The program run by the Orange County Department of Education, which for 25 years has provided child care to nearly 1,000 children from low-income families, will end Dec. 15.

All but one of its 13 child development centers will be taken over by two private, nonprofit child-care centers. Child Development Inc. of Campbell will take over 10, and Child’s Pace of Costa Mesa will operate two. One will close. Most of the children now in the program can remain, but the 200 teachers and aides face drastic pay cuts--in most cases up to one-third of their salaries. Some will lose health benefits.

Many employees have decided to leave, raising questions about the quality of education that is seen as a key to the future academic success of the disadvantaged children.

“I feel betrayed,” said Jennifer Campanaro, who has taught in the county’s Costa Mesa center for the last 10 years but quit rather than take a pay cut.

Campanaro expressed doubts that lesser-paid educators, most of whom will make $10 to $16 an hour, can successfully teach the children English and other scholastic skills.

“If we can teach them English, than they have a fighting chance when they get to elementary school,” she said. “It’s important, or I thought it was.”

But John LeVere, director of Costa-Mesa-based Child’s Pace, defended the quality of his existing child-care center. He will give teachers training seminars and other support, he said, though he acknowledged, “There’s no way I can pay those teachers what they were getting.”

The state’s $1.9-billion child-care program funnels money through a variety of organizations. In all, about 300,000 children across the state are served by the program, said Michael Jett, director of child development for the state Department of Education.

The program is one of a range of government-subsidized child-care offerings for low-income families. But money from those programs cannot be used to rescue the endangered programs, in which funding has not kept up with the pace of pay increases.

Orange County officials decided in September that they could no longer afford to operate the state-funded program. Because of collective bargaining agreements, child development teachers in most school districts get the same pay raises as regular classroom teachers, but the state does not provide the funding for them.

This year, when Gov. Gray Davis and the Legislature helped award teachers across California significant new raises, in many cases more than 10%, many district and county-run child education programs had to scramble to keep their programs running while those teachers got the same raises.

“When I heard about Orange County, I thought, ‘I could see our district heading down that same path,’ ” Oda said. “We have been basically surviving, and we need to do more than survive.”

Administrators in many other districts felt the same way and are determined to make legislators aware of the problems.

They hastily called a meeting for Monday in Sacramento. The group will meet again in December to hash out strategies to lobby state officials.

Ellin Chariton, director of child development services for the Orange County Department of Education, said the formation of the lobbying group was the one good thing that has come out of her program’s closures.

“When we went public with our problem, other agencies realized they have serious concerns,” she said. “It has kept me up at night. . . . We all have a great worry that the future of this system can no longer operate.”