Good Times Yield Child Care Crisis

California’s ongoing economic boom, which has increased employment and the value of homes and stock portfolios, also has created an unprecedented crisis in the child care industry that makes participation in the new economy possible for most families--and the problem is most acute in Los Angeles.

According to a state-funded study to be released in Sacramento today, there are six children of working parents for every licensed child care spot available in Los Angeles County; statewide, there are five children of working parents for every slot.

Moreover, a parent who earns the state’s median income now spends nearly a fifth of it on child care, while minimum wage earners in many areas must spend more than half of everything they make to pay for child care.

“This is a problem for everybody,” said Alice Walker Duff, president of the California Child Care Resource & Referral Network, which compiled the report. The network is an association of 61 state-funded agencies in all 58 counties that provide referrals for child care, offer parents information on how to choose quality care, and help policymakers by gathering data and identifying key areas of local need.

“So often people tend to compartmentalize this issue, but you can’t fix it for one group,” Duff said. “It has to work for everyone. Society needs these children to grow up well. This is real. These aren’t just platitudes. These are our children; they are our future doctors, lawyers, airport mechanics, MTA bus drivers, our grocery store clerks.”

Several Los Angeles child care providers agreed with the report’s findings that care is in extremely short supply for the crucial infant and toddler years, and that the problem has become much more pronounced as more parents join the work force.

At the Joy Picus Child Care Center at City Hall, for example, waiting lists abound for infant and toddler care. The center has 70 children, plus an additional 55 waiting to get in.

The shortage of licensed care for the state’s 3.9 million children needing it actually is worse than the report states, officials with the group say. Although the report says there are five children per slot, those figures were based on 1990 census data. With more people employed now, and more children needing care, officials say that number is extremely conservative. The figure does not take into account, however, children whose parents prefer to leave them with relatives or baby-sitters at home.

Of the 17 calls to providers that Valorie Moore-Porter made last week, only two had space for her 2-month-old. Currently on maternity leave, Moore-Porter says she plans to return to her job as a tape operator for a post production company next month and is growing increasingly nervous about where her son will be placed.

“I would say that you should look while you’re pregnant,” she said.

Moreover, since she had a daughter six years ago, Moore-Porter was stunned to learn how high day care costs have risen. “I expected that it would be about the same” as when she had her daughter, she said. “Boy, was I wrong.”

In Los Angeles County, the report shows that a family earning the minimum wage spends 60% of its annual income of $11,960 on infant child care at a licensed facility. A low-income family earning $30,000 annually spends 24% and a median-income family, making $35,863, spends 20%, the report found.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is expected to vote today on a $10-million grant and loan program aimed at increasing the number of child care slots in the county. But providers and others say the problem is so large statewide that state funding probably is the only way to solve it.

“Los Angeles County alone cannot equalize and improve the quality of child care programs,” said Bruce Fuller, co-director of Policy Analysis of California Education and an education and public policy professor at UC Berkeley. “It really does have to come from Sacramento.”

As the report being issued today also shows, studies by the group found that Los Angeles County has a “much lower” supply of center-based child care and preschools than Bay Area counties, Fuller said.

For the hundreds of families who are considered Los Angeles’ working poor, child care costs often are prohibitive, according to the report and local providers. Frequently, those parents don’t receive subsidies for day care, while many families leaving welfare assistance receive money to cover those costs for a time.

“The so-called working poor don’t have access to any of the human resources they desperately need,” said Duane Dennis, the executive director of Child and Family Services, a referral and resource agency in central Los Angeles that serves Highland Park, Echo Park and Hollywood, among other places. “It’s a real sad fact that we’re dealing with, particularly in Los Angeles County where you have a large number of people at the poverty level who aren’t on public assistance.”

For many of these and other people, the only alternative is to rely on friends and family. As Dennis said, “The bottom line is that a lot of the time, they’re going to Grandma.”

California expects to put more than a half-million welfare recipients to work over the next few years; of those, more than 60% are single parents with at least one child under 5.

“As a result of welfare reform, we’ve about doubled the number of calls we’ve received” from parents seeking child care, Dennis said, echoing the word from many other child care providers in the city.

Additionally, parents are not only seeking workday care, many more now are searching for quality child care for such nontraditional hours as weekends and evenings. That type of care is even harder to come by, providers and others say. Demand also is up for after-school care, the report found; nearly a quarter of all calls to resource and referral agencies are looking for help finding programs for school-aged children.

Along with a robust economy that has more parents returning to work, another crushing problem for child care providers is the high rate of turnover within their staffs. A child care worker who is paid just over $16,000 a year in Los Angeles County has many opportunities to earn more in this economy, officials with the child care resource group say. A preschool teacher, for example, makes more than $20,000.

Nationally, the report said, turnover in the child care field is estimated at 30% a year, a level of instability that can hurt both providers and families.

“Child care almost becomes like taking a vow,” said Patty Siegel, executive director of the child care network. “It has to be a competitive job and not one that is only for those of us who are the true believers.”

The problem for many parents, of course, is the quality of the child care offered. With study after study showing that early childhood development is crucial to success in later years, parents are seeking what they consider top quality providers.

“There are parents who will visit any number of centers, but they’re disappointed,” said Laura Escobedo, the associate director of community relations for the Child Care Resource Center in Van Nuys. “We are working with providers to improve their training . . . but this is something we have to watch carefully.”

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A Big Bite

A parent who earns the state’s median income now spends nearly a fifth of it on child care, while a minimum-wage earner must spend more than half of everything he or she makes to paywhile a minimum-wage earner must spend more than half of everything he or she makes to pay for child care.

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Source: The California Child Care Portfolio