Thursday, December 5, 1996
FINANCE:
Fees may rise 10 percent in proposed increase, the largest
everBy Yvonne Champana
Daily Bruin Contributor
Child-care prices at UCLA will experience the biggest increase
ever next year unless administrators can come up with creative
solutions to the problem of rising costs, said Gay MacDonald,
Executive Director of UCLA Child Care Services.
UCLA’s child-care system is facing a 10 percent increase in
costs, Mac Donald said  a burden that parents will likely
take up next year when those fee increases go into effect.
"By comparison, in recent years there have been either no
increases or approximately 5-percent-per-year increases," she
said.
Since the program must pay their teachers more in order to
dissuade high turnover  which is about 40 percent per year in
California’s day-care centers  they must pay their teachers
higher salaries, MacDonald said.
This high turnover rate is bad for children, some of whom are
placed in child care for 10 hours per day, five days per week from
the time they are two months old until they are 5 years old, she
added.
This dependency on child care will become more common as more
women opt to work or are being forced into the work force due to
the recent welfare reform legislation, said Ann Bersard, director
of the University Village Child Care Center.
"UCLA’s child-care rates are very good compared to other day
care options in the community," Bersard said, since the UCLA system
does not have the high overhead that private care centers may
have.
But as private day-care chains can provide benefits to its
employees that UCLA does not extend to its caretakers, those who
work in the centers at UCLA often cannot afford to send their own
children to the place where they work.
"UCLA just lost one teacher to a big chain that offers a 50
percent child-care discount to parents that work at the center. We
just cannot compete with that," MacDonald said, in spite of the
fact that about 80 percent of the system’s funds go to staff and
teacher salaries.
But that money is well spent, administrators said, because the
teacher-child ratio at UCLA is much lower than at a public school’s
day care center. At UCLA, the ratio is one teacher to seven or
eight preschool-age children, and one teacher for every three or
four infants or toddlers.
Bersard is so concerned about the fate of California’s children
that she has become a lobbyist in Sacramento for child-care
improvement.
As a result of her efforts, combined with about 20 volunteers
lobbying for children, major gains have been made, Bersard
said.
But those gains are still not enough, she added, and she has
vowed to continue in the struggle to gain more aid and space for
quality day care statewide.
"If all the parents who have been in the Headstart program,
which is a nonprofit childcare organization that has existed for 32
years, voted, things would be very different," she says.
Despite the higher costs, however, children will not go without
child care, Bersard said. Of the 97 children in UCLA’s four
centers, 40 are fully subsidized, and therefore their parents pay
nothing for their children’s care.
There is also a Headstart program at UCLA which is free to those
who qualify, and a nonprofit cooperative where parents donate time
rather than pay higher costs.
But in the name of cutting costs, administrators have teachers
volunteer one Saturday per quarter for cleaning, which the school
cannot afford to pay for.
System fund-raisers are also held to help alleviate the funding
problems, and MacDonald is considering the possibility of offering
no-interest loans to help students’ parents pay for child care.
"If you mess up child care in the first two years of a child’s
life," MacDonald said, "it is impossible to correct it later
on."
GENEVIEVE LIANG/Daily Bruin
Donna Kwon plays with Debby Morataya-Lee at the UCLA Day Care
Center on Bellagio. Kwon is one of many children in UCLA care
centers whose parents may be burdened increased costs.