Firms Get Involved in Business of Child Care : While Some Employers Try to Meet Needs of Working Parents, Shortage of Facilities Exists

Sue Ko came to the Irvine Hilton on Friday for the symposium “Child Care: A Cost of Doing Business.” But the preschool director found herself sidetracked for a while in the hall feeding a bottle to an 8-week-old infant while the child’s father, Irvine City Councilman Ray Catalano, spoke on the city’s dedication to solving the day care dilemma.

It was his day to care for the child, Catalano explained. His wife was working and the sitters fell through.

The ironic situation could not have better demonstrated the symposium’s message: Child care is no longer just the private problem of working mothers.

“Sixty percent of men have wives who are working. Neither men nor women have wives at home” to take care of the children, said Dana Friedman, a senior researcher at the New York-based Work and Family Information Center, who gave the keynote speech on the state of child care in the corporate world. Mothers experience the most stress from conflicts between work and family, but men who are involved in child care are not immune from the same stress, which can affect job performance, she said.

Many Underestimate Problem

Many older executive officers don’t identify with the problem, or they may underestimate it because employees are too afraid to speak up, Friedman said. One executive mother whose child was sick came into work two hours late after making arrangements for the child’s care, Friedman said. But she told her colleagues that she had had a flat tire because she didn’t want her male counterparts to think she was less committed to work than they were.

But William Popejoy, chairman of Financial Corp. of America, a holding company in Irvine that owns American Savings and Loan Assn., told the symposium’s audience that “corporate child care assistance is becoming a necessity. . . . The ‘50s baby boom has created its own baby boom, and these parents, realizing the necessity of the dual-income household in order to attain the American dream, need child care.” He said that by 1990, 60% of mothers of children under 3 will be working.

During the past four years, the number of medium and large employers providing some form of day care assistance to their employees has grown dramatically, from 600 to 2,500, Friedman said. In some cases, she said, the companies are family-owned with family-oriented policies; some are administered by young fathers who understand conflicts between work and family, and some regard child care as a good business strategy to reduce absenteeism, turnover and tardiness and improve productivity and morale.

300 Attended

Nearly 300 people, many of them middle-management executives representing about 100 Orange County businesses, attended the symposium sponsored by the City of Irvine, the Irvine Co., the Industrial League of Orange County and AMI/The Irvine Medical Center. Some were fathers of preschoolers and said they were attempting to involve their corporations in day care.

In Orange County, 6,000 children were on waiting lists for subsidized child care in 1984 and there will be 24,700 new child care spaces needed for children 5 and under by 1988, according to the Commission on the Status of Women. In Irvine, only 61% of the children under 5 who need child care receive it, and only 19% of the school-age children, according to the city.

In panels and seminars, researchers and business representatives described new models of corporate solutions and pioneering public-private-community partnerships. All repeatedly stressed that their interest was not altruistic.

“Unless we do something unique, our widget looks like any other widget,” said Brandy Birtcher, a partner in the family-run Birtcher development firm. On Sept. 2, the company opened the county’s first on-site day care center in an industrial park at its new Orange County Technology Center, at the intersection of the Costa Mesa Freeway and Dyer Road in Santa Ana.

“I felt child care would provide something my competition would not provide. And I wanted to be on the leading edge,” he said. He added that the project received substantial public relations benefits from the publicity it received.

Armstrong Learning Center leases and operates the child care facility, which is open to a maximum of 140 children, from 2 years to second grade. It costs up to $72 a week plus a $35 annual registration fee. So far, the center is only 60% full, he said.

Essential to Irvine

Catalano called child care “essential” in Irvine to lure capital investment and industry. If young families, an attractive labor force, can be drawn to the city, industry will follow, he said. “It’s a major part of our marketing strategy.”

In addition to a full-time child care coordinator and a city child care committee, Irvine sponsors before- and after-school recreation programs, incentives for family day care providers and a joint child care project with the school district to raise money and provide child care on elementary school sites.

But despite the city’s efforts, child care--particularly home-based care for school-age children--is in critically short supply in Irvine, said Kate Clark, a member of the Irvine Child Care Committee. One reason is that 70% of the city’s mothers work and are not at home to provide such care, she said. Those who do not work cannot afford homes large enough to meet the licensing requirements, she said.

“One mother confessed that her child was burned out going to art and science classes or Cub Scouts after school. But if he weren’t in these classes, she didn’t know what she would do,” Clark said. In one case, she said, parents had locked their children, ages 5 and 8, in a garage so they could go to work.

The city’s new civic center complex at the corner of Harvard Avenue and Alton Parkway will have an on-site facility open to the public as well as city employees.

Another employer-sponsored child care facility--a project of American Savings--is scheduled to open early next year at an as yet unknown site in La Habra. Modeled after the company’s award-winning Little Mavericks School of Learning in Stockton, the facility would serve children of 800 company employees concentrated in Fullerton and Whittier.

The Stockton Center is sponsored, subsidized and operated by the corporation, Popejoy said. Located in a renovated church, it serves 160 children of 1,800 employees--a great many of them clerical employees who have been spending as much as 30% of their total income on child care, said the Newport Beach corporate chairman. It costs parents $175 to $235 a month for care, including hot meals and snacks.

More than a baby-sitting service, the program is a developmental learning center, staffed by teachers with bachelor’s degrees in early childhood education and aides who meet acceptable standards, Popejoy said. Teachers are paid between $1,600 and $1,800 a month and aides between $1,200 and $1,400 a month--more than the typical child care salary. Parents may visit any time and a shuttle service is provided.

The company also offers programs for parents, such as lectures on education and parenting, a resource library and one-on-one confidential conferences.

“Each month, American Savings spends less on Little Mavericks than it does on its coffee service,” Popejoy said. “I think it’s a better investment.”

Popejoy said that managers have noticed improved productivity of parents in the program, work time is not wasted, and parents are no longer distracted by guilt. Also, he said, they no longer jam the switchboards between 3:30 and 4 p.m. to check on whether their children have arrived home safely.

This year, the California Assn. for the Education of Young Children presented its first corporate award for quality education to the company.

25% of Firms Willing

No comprehensive survey of Orange County firms has been undertaken, but one informal survey last year by Resco, a Newport Beach property development and management firm, indicated that 25% of the firms would be willing to increase their budgets 15% to pay for day care facilities for their employees.

Forms of Assistance

Like many other companies, the Irvine Co. has delayed a child care program because of concerns over obtaining liability insurance, said Larry Heglar, director of land sales projects, who attended the conference.

Popejoy said he was able to obtain liability insurance at a reasonable rate by having a high-quality program. In addition, all Little Maverick teachers are employees of American Savings and are thus covered under the company’s plan.

Though Heglar said the Irvine Co. does not want to get “into the child care business,” he is negotiating a lease for a child care facility in University Town Center (which should open next fall) and has located a one-acre site on Avocado Avenue in Newport Center for another.

Another new project for 2- to 5-year-olds in Woodland Park involves a consortium of the United Way, Cal State Northridge and the Los Angeles School District, according to Diane Philibosian, a Cal State Northridge educator. Called the Center for Childhood Creativity, the consortium-sponsored day care center will open in November on an as yet undecided campus of the school district.

To claps from the audience, Philibosian said, “We insisted on adequate salaries. Too long have child care personnel subsidized child care projects (with low salaries).” The assistant director will earn $17,500 a year, she said. Parents will be charged $395 a month, but some subsidies will be provided.

In addition to on-site or near-site solutions, participants heard other methods of assistance, including coordination of family day care, programs for mildly ill children, after-school and summer or holiday programs arranged by companies. Fluor Corp. in Irvine offers such a program.

Other arrangements suggested include direct financial assistance with child care expenses, subsidies, donations to child care centers used by employees, and information and referral programs. Some companies have offered benefits packages, alternative work schedules, at-home work, part-time jobs, job sharing, parental leave or job assistance.

“There is no child care option that is not in some way tax deductible,” Friedman said.

Rosemary Mans from the Bank of America decribed the company’s year-old California Child Care Initiative, which aimed to increase child care spaces in five California areas: San Francisco, Contra Costa County, Sacramento, West Los Angeles/South Bay, Long Beach and Bakersfield/Ridgecrest.

With $700,000 in public and private funds, the project used the state’s 65 existing state-funded child care resource and referral agencies to recruit and train new child care providers. As of this month, the project has created 214 new licensed providers for more than 1,000 children.

Though employer-assisted child care has come a long way, symposium sponsors agreed that there still is a long way to go. According to Friedman, nearly 44,000 companies with more than 100 employees are not attempting to meet the need for child care in any way.

“I get the feeling it’s something most businesses don’t want to think about,” said the Irvine Co.’s Heglar. “But because of the demographics, we have to.”