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Friends of the Fourth
District:
Recently, the Los Angeles County Child Care Planning Committee sent
their annual child care needs assessment to the California
Department of Education. This report details key information on the
current state of child development services in Los Angeles County.
This includes a review of traditional day care for children from
infancy to 12 years old, as well as preschool and Head Start.
This year's report presents further evidence of something I have
thought may be true for a long time: California is not funding the
type of child development services that are most needed. As a
result, some programs have enormous waiting lists, while others are
returning unspent funds to the CA Department of Education.
The County's Needs Assessment report has pointed out that many
working parents say they need full-day, full-year care for their
children. Yet recent program expansions have consisted mainly
increases to part-day, part-year care, such as Head Start, State
Preschool and slots created by Los Angeles Universal Preschool (LAUP).
This is despite numerous reports and studies that show that
full-day, full-year care is the type of service that hard-working
parents say they need the most, whether it is day care or preschool.
The impact of these policies can be seen in the State Preschool
Program, which last year was funded at over $350 million statewide.
But this program is consistently underspent, because the funds are
restricted to part day, part-year services for children ages 3 to 5
years old. Over the past three years, contractors in Los Angeles
County have had to return over $27 million dollars to the state in
unspent funds. Why? 20% of them surveyed indicated that the families
that they serve need full-day care and cannot use a half-day
program.
Consider also that last year's state budget included $50 million in
one-time capital funds to expand preschool capacity, as well as $50
million in ongoing Prop 98 funding to support new preschool services
in communities with low API scores. I applaud and support these
efforts to invest resources in the expansion and maintenance of
preschool services, but this will only fund part-day, part-year
preschool. Approximately $13.6 million of this funding is expected
to go to Los Angeles County. In a survey taken of 37 preschool
contractors in Los Angeles County, over half of them indicated that
their organizations would not be applying for this funding. One of
the main reasons they cited was that the families they served needed
full-day child development services.
In fact, the demand for full day child development services has
increased across the economic spectrum. In Los Angeles County, the
demand for center-based care exceeds the current supply by 73,000
slots. The number of children with working parents grew by 28,955
between 2004 and 2006, which creates added pressure to the already
insufficient supply. Also, the upcoming changes to the welfare
system will require thousands of parents to work additional hours
and spend more time in employment related activities. Access to
child care development is often touted as a major "barrier buster"
to a family seeking to leave welfare and become self-sufficient.
Shouldn't the resources we invest in it be flexible enough to meet
their needs?
California has invested billions of dollars in child development.
Our society places a high premium on ensuring that children are well
cared for and fully prepared to enter school while their parents are
working.
High quality, full -day child development programs are instrumental
in preparing thousands of children for elementary school. However,
shuffling unspent funds back and forth between Los Angeles County
and Sacramento, especially when there are well-documented service
gaps, does not benefit the children this funding was intended to
serve. To maximize our investment of taxpayer dollars, policymakers
need to take a broader look at the scope of child development
services that are offered, and align it more closely to what parents
are saying that they need.
DON KNABE
Supervisor, Fourth District
County of Los Angeles
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