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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.