Amgen Day-Care Center Makes Child’s Play of Workers’ Worries

Kathy Smith learned she was pregnant in June of last year. By July, the Amgen employee had placed her yet-to-be-born child on a waiting list for the company’s day-care program.

It was a smart move.

In the past, parents who work for Amgen, the county’s largest private employer, have waited months--or years--to take advantage of the biotech firm’s day-care services. The waiting list had gotten so long, in fact, that children often could not be enrolled until they were 2 or 3 years old.

The company solved its day-care crunch last week with the opening of a new child-care center, a 45,000-square-foot, two-building complex that can house 430 children. The facility, for children ages 6 weeks to 5 years, is located on the Amgen Inc. campus in Thousand Oaks.

The facility’s opening comes at a time when day-care services are scarce throughout the county, demand is skyrocketing and working parents are increasingly choosy about where they leave their children.

“The yuppies are moving in and having children,” said Jane Probst, a home day-care provider and co-president of Child Care Connection, an association that links Simi Valley and Moorpark parents with day-care services.

The Amgen center amounts to a small elementary school, with 32 classrooms, 16 playgrounds and 107 teachers. And this is no baby-sitting service. The center offers a curriculum that includes math, science, printing, reading and art.

It is a toddler palace. There are foam mountains for climbing, low windows for peeking out and plenty of playgrounds with towers and ladders for frolicking.

The facility makes it easy for parents to soothe cranky toddlers, nurse infants or kiss boo-boos.

“My friends who don’t have this are really envious,” said Smith, who works in the company’s quality-assurance group. “Some have stayed home because they can’t find good day care.”

The company offers the care to employees for 10% to 12% below average day-care costs, which can run $500 a month for a preschooler and $1,100 per month for an infant. The program serves 295 children and can accommodate about 130 more.

Corporate day-care programs like Amgen’s are scarce in Ventura County. Ventura-based Patagonia Inc. and Kinko’s Inc. both provide day-care services to employees, Probst said. But few others do.

Corporations are catching on to the idea, however, said Leslie Spanier, vice president of operations for Bright Horizons Family Solutions, a contractor that operates the Amgen day-care center and more than 330 others nationwide.

“It shows their commitment to their employees in a very large and generous way and says they really want to attract and retain the best employees,” she said.

Patagonia has provided day-care services since 1984 for similar reasons, said Anita Garaway-Furtaw, who runs the company’s center.

“It’s important from a business standpoint,” she said. “We honestly believe if we’re going to remain competitive in the international workplace, we have to help our employees balance their home life with their work life. When employees are experiencing lack of balance between those two areas, one of the first things to drop off is productivity.”

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