Tough economy: Some child care spots open as parents lose jobs
| Friday, Mar 13 2009 06:55 PM
Last Updated Wednesday, Mar 25 2009 06:16 PM
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Help finding care
Community Connection for Child Care offers free referrals to licensed child care providers, and can search countywide or by neighborhood. Call (661) 861-5200, toll free at (877) 861-5200, or log onto www.kernchildcare.org.
Kern LINCC is a child care advocacy group that works to increase the supply of local, quality child care. Call (661) 636-4572 or log onto http://kcsos.kern.org/cccc/lincc.
California state law requires licensed child care facilities to make copies of licensing reports available to the public, so you can research a facility to see if it has a history of complaints. The industry is regulated by the State Department of Social Services Community Care Licensing Division. Call (559) 243-4588 or log onto www.ccld.ca.gov.
Parents can conduct a criminal background check on babysitters who have registered with Trustline, a statewide nonprofit screening organization. You will need the babysitter’s name and driver’s license number. Call (800) 822-8490 or log onto www.trustline.org.
Images:
Heir Force Academy preschool teacher Jenny Coburn works with Tristan Lewis on his letters during Friday's class in southwest Bakersfield.
Tristan Lewis has some fun during class time while working on his letters.
Addison Coburn works on learning her letters at the Heir Force Academy preschool.
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Carrie Lauro didn’t have any trouble enrolling her toddler in preschool when she was looking for a place to educate him last March.
She checked out several schools with openings before settling on her first choice, Heir Force Academy in the southwest.
“I had heard great things about it and was really impressed by the director and the teachers,” said Lauro, 33.
The ease with which Lauro found a spot would seem to be good news for Kern County, where in the past civic leaders have wrung their hands over inadequate licensed child care supply.
There are early indications the tide is turning, but that could be a mixed blessing. Those openings may be a sign of a weak economy.
Kern County’s unemployment rate was nearly 14 percent in January, according to the California Employment Development Department. That’s compared with 10.6 percent statewide and 8.5 percent nationally.
With fewer people working, there isn’t as much need for child care.
It’s tough to pinpoint the region’s precise child care capacity because commercial and home-based centers open and close every month, but there’s anecdotal evidence that vacancies are on the upswing.
“One of the things that we’ve seen is that some of the child care centers in town that never had openings, who used to have waiting lists, now are starting to have openings,” said Lisa Duncan-Purcell, program manager of Community Connection for Child Care, a local child development and family services agency that operates a child care referral service.
As recently as last year, advocacy group Kern Local Investment in Child Care, better known as Kern LINCC, projected a shortage of 20,000 licensed child care spaces in Kern County through 2015.
That would mean about 85 new child care centers and/or school programs and another 1,000 family child care homes would be needed to keep pace with the county’s growth.
The shortage is still acute with infants, who are more expensive to care for due to state mandates regulating the ratio of adults to babies.
“A lot of places just don’t have enough staff to take very many, or they don’t want to deal with diapers so they won’t accept children who aren’t potty trained,” Duncan-Purcell said.
But for the toddler set, things are looking up.
An informal survey of some of the larger preschools in town found vacancies at most.
Mercy Child Care Center still has a waiting list for infants, but there are spots for toddlers.
“I’ve noticed that gradually more parents are going from five days a week to maybe just two or three days,” said director Sharon Brown.
The center hasn’t cut staff, but is using substitutes on days when attendance is low, she said.
Jenny Coburn, 32, teaches at Heir Force, and her class includes her 3-year-old daughter.
“My husband is out of work so it’s harder, financially, to keep my daughter in school, but we’ve really tried hard not to pull her out because it’s so beneficial,” she said.
Karisa Houser, assistant director at Heir Force, attributes her openings not to the economy, but to the fact that the center — only in its second year of business — is still building. In fact, Houser thinks Heir Force could benefit from the economic downturn.
“These days, a lot of stay-at-home moms need to go back to work,” she said.
Novi, Mich.,-based Learning Care Group is the parent company of La Petite Academy, a preschool chain whose Bakersfield location has seen a slight drop in enrollment since last year.
The company’s government relations team is collecting information on how the recession is affecting families and lobbying politicians to protect funding for early childhood education.
“As child advocates, we are working with all of our families to assist them as they face pay-cuts, layoffs and struggle with financial issues,” said Learning Care Group spokeswoman Amy Popp.
Meanwhile, centers fortunate enough to be full are counting themselves lucky.
“We have lost a few due to parents losing jobs or moving away, but we fill those right away,” said Janice Riese-O’Rourke, director of St. John’s Children’s Center. “Fortunately, I haven’t noticed much change. We still have waiting lists.”
