First Lady Offers Praise During Tour of Child-Care Facility

First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and seven Democratic governors visited a Westside child-care center Monday, calling its program for whole-family education and personal responsibility a national model for early childhood development.

The group, in Los Angeles for the Democratic Governors Assn.’s National Policy Forum on Children, praised the Mar Vista Family Center for improving life in the working-class community with free child care at a reasonable cost to government and private donors--about $3,500 per family per year.

“This is the village that we talk about and that I wrote about,” said Clinton, referring to her best-selling book “It Takes a Village” after touring the small center near Culver City. “This is something that we know we can do to change people’s lives and to change communities.”

The first lady’s brief stay in Los Angeles centered on advocacy for children but was scheduled to end Monday night with a fund-raising dinner in Beverly Hills for Democratic U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer.

On Sunday night, Clinton attended a dinner to promote early childhood education, along with director Rob Reiner, whose recent documentary, “I Am Your Child,” stressed how the brain develops in the first three years of life. On Monday afternoon, at a speech in Santa Monica, she asked the governors and child advocates to push harder for child development and education programs.

It was the visit to the unassuming child-care center--tucked beside the Ballona Creek flood control channel, not far from the Mar Vista Gardens housing project--that became the thematic linchpin for the entire visit.

Founded in 1977 by educational therapist Betty Factor, the center requires parents to become involved in education in order for their children to be enrolled there, mandating at least weekly visits. Many of the parents also take child-rearing classes at UCLA. Toddlers and small children also learn responsibility by making agreements at the beginning of each day on how they will conduct themselves.

Costs at the center--funded by donations and the Community Development Department of the city of Los Angeles--are kept down because parent volunteers augment the paid staff.

Lucia Diaz, who came to the center 16 years ago, said she learned how to work with her three children without screaming and eventually learned to teach others. She became executive director of the center two years ago.

“This is a castle of dreamers,” Diaz said. “This is a place that can transform people’s lives by teaching them to take care of themselves.”