Angels Out of It, But Here’s Hopeful Pitch

Requests for day-care services in Orange County are up 26% since 1996, according to a report on children released Tuesday.

The 7th Annual Report on the Conditions of Children in Orange County 2001 covers a variety of social issues--from drug use to foster care--facing the county’s estimated 700,000 children.

“Child care is definitely a heavy need,” said Gene Howard, president of Orangewood Children’s Foundation. “It’s one of the continuing needs in the county.”

Not surprisingly, parents and guardians cited employment as the main reason they needed child-care help, the report said.

There were about 14,300 requests from Orange County for child-care referrals at the Children’s Home Society of California in fiscal year 1999-2000; there were 11,324 referrals in 1995-96, the report said.

The society is part of the state’s Child Care Resource and Referral Network.

The majority of requests were for the youngest children, infants to 2 years.

The success of the county’s CalWORKS welfare-to-work program is part of the reason for the increased need for day-care services.

Formerly known as Aid to Families With Dependent Children, the subsidy program now focuses on job training and putting adults into the job market.

The result is that more parents, especially single mothers, are going back into the work force, which means they need either affordable or subsidized child care, Howard said.

“We have more of these folks who are working and we haven’t created the [child-care] capacity to keep up with that,” he said.

Costs for child-care services take more of the household budget for low- and middle-class families than for others, child-care advocates said.

For example, a family earning minimum wage of $6.25 an hour, about $13,000 a year, would be using 70% of its income to pay for an infant in a licensed child-care center, which costs an average of about $174 a week, the report said.

But a family earning the county median income of $65,916 a year is spending only 14% of its household income toward child-care costs for an infant.

The report also indicated that juvenile felony arrests for drug use have dropped by 13%.

But misdemeanor arrests for juveniles being drunk in public are up 46%, and misdemeanor violations for marijuana and other drugs are up 20%.

“This implies that there is still a sizable unmet need for treatment services for the county’s youth,” the report stated.

But there were some positive trends in the report, including that fewer teenagers are giving birth.

The county’s birthrate for teens 15 to 19 dropped from 56.6 per 1,000 to 44.4.

Of the 46,513 births in the county in 1999, only 8% were to teen mothers, the report said.

“Look at birthrate for teens and also the county’s [high school] dropout rates,” Howard said. “There has been some great progress.”

High school dropout rates continue to show a steady decline, falling from 2.2% in 1995 to 1.4% last year. The statewide dropout rate was 3%.

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Growing Need

Requests for Child-Care Referrals