Page One

A group of Laney College students received an unpleasant surprise in the mail earlier this month: a notice that because of budget problems, the Laney College Children’s Center was closing its infant and toddler day care program effective the end of this school year. 

On Tuesday night, anguished student-parents crowded the Peralta Community College Board of Trustees meeting, complaining about the last-minute nature of the notice, and several saying that without day care facilities for their children they would probably have to drop out of college themselves. 

Taisha Jefferson, a full-time Laney College single-parent student with a 22-month-old daughter at the Laney Children’s Center, told trustees, “My academic progress wouldn’t have been possible” without the center. 

And Maha Allen, whose infant will not be able to attend the center next year because of the closing, said, “The timing of the notification letter was particularly bad,” coming as it did in the middle of finals. 

She added that “this was a really stressful week for us.” 

And Mahasin Moon, a San Francisco State student whose children began attending the children’s center when Moon was attending Laney College, called the services at the center “incredibly important to the community. The community college is eliminating our community.”  

Moon and several of the other parents are members of the Children’s Center Parent Advisory Committee, an independent group which Moon later said has raises between $800 and $1,200 a year to support center activities, including sponsoring graduation ceremonies and cultural celebrations. 

Several of the parents praised the operations at the center itself, one of them saying that “my child never cries when I take her to the center. She only cries when I come there to take her home. She’s having so much fun. The activities and the programs there are fantastic.” 

Because the item was not on the trustees agenda Tuesday night, trustees could not discuss the matter, or even ask Peralta administrators for clarification. 

On Thursday morning, Peralta officials were meeting with a group of the affected student-parents to try to work out a solution. Peralta officials admitted that they have been working on the potential closures for a year, and said that the failure to notify the affected parents until a few weeks before the end of the semester was a “mistake.” 

Linda Mitchell, who has directed the Laney College Children’s Center for 13 years, said that while she knew that the infant program was scheduled to be closed at the end of this year and had informed parents, she was not informed of the toddler closing herself until “a month and a half ago.” 

The Laney College Children’s Center is located on East 10th Street next door to the Laney College Football Stadium and across the street from the Oakland Unified School District Administration Building, in the suddenly-hot potential commercial-residential development zone bordering the Lake Merritt Channel that connects the lake to the estuary. 

It currently serves 48 children between 3 and 5 years old, 16 toddlers between 2 and 3 years old, and 11 infants under 2 years old. While the parents of many of the center’s children are Laney College students, the center is open to the general public for enrollment. 

The 3-5 year old portion of the center’s activities will not be affected by the proposed toddler and infant closures. 

Although the center is not exclusively a low-income facility, many of its programs are geared towards that section of the community, and several of the parents said they were receiving state subsidies in order to keep their children in the program. 

In her notification to parents, Peralta Children’s Center Site Manager Danielle Waite said that the ongoing 3-5 year old program at the centers “has spaces with our Child Development Contract for low-income families, which remains free or low cost … We are going to prioritize student families over working families beginning Fall 2006, not the lowest income.” 

Shortly after parents received the notification letter of the closings on May 11, the Parent Advisory Committee sent out an email to parents and Peralta trustees, saying in part that “low-income families are the most vulnerable of Laney’s population. It would be a travesty to remove a working program that has changed so many lives, and aided in the access of higher education and upward mobility for so many families over the years.” 

Advisory Committee member Moon said in a telephone interview that committee members later met with Peralta Trustee Alona Clifton, who “said she had no idea that the cuts were going on.” 

Peralta Vice Chancellor Margaret Haig told trustees Tuesday night that the closures were necessary because of mounting deficits of Peralta’s three children’s centers, including Laney, College of Alameda, and Merritt College. Haig said that the centers lost $100,000 in fiscal year 2003, $200,000 in fiscal year 2004, and were projecting a $400,000 deficit in the current fiscal year. 

During the meeting with student-parents on Thursday morning, she blamed the mounting deficits on a mandatory state-required student-teacher ratio that did not allow the centers to cut costs by cutting staff, as well as the demand by Service Employees International Union 790 to get rid of Peralta’s hourly worker program, including workers at the child care centers. 

Haig explained that Peralta did not have to pay health care costs for the hourly workers, but with those workers becoming permanent employees, she said that health care costs at the child care centers are skyrocketing. 

Haig also said that the child care centers were under a mandate from the Peralta Board of Trustees to make the child care centers pay for themselves out of fees and direct state subsidies, without money coming out of the Peralta district budget. 

Haig also promised that center and district officials would work with individual parents to get state day care subsidies and to have their children placed in other child care facilities. 

Despite that promise, Haig and Danielle Waite, site manager for the district’s three children’s centers, came under withering criticism from participants at Thursday morning’s meeting, including Laney Academic Senate President Evelyn Lord. 

Saying that “Laney College has been shut out of this process until now” and that “I am highly offended that I wasn’t brought into this issue earlier,” Lord said that “if you had brought Laney College in on this problem from the beginning, I believe we would have come up with a solution by now.” 

She also criticized district and college priorities, saying “why do we have a college football team while we are closing down parts of our child care center? Why are we hiring more people in the district headquarters when we say we don’t have enough money to hire day care teachers? It doesn’t make sense.” Lord suggested that the Peralta Foundation be approached to “keep the infants and toddlers program floating for a while until we can come up with a permanent solution.”  

With Lord and the parents stating that they wanted to work on finding alternate funding to supplement the center’s activities, Haig and Waite agreed to hold a followup meeting in July, with Haig promising to include SEIU Local 790 officials as well as Peralta Chief Financial Officer Tom Smith.