Grateful Parents Praise New Child Care Center

Carmen Salinas knew she tempted every parent’s nightmare when, after a baby-sitter suddenly canceled, she left her two kids with a stranger on a Hollywood street before rushing off to work.

“Please, do you think you can baby-sit until I find someone else?” Salinas asked the startled woman while handing over her 2-year-old daughter and 6-month-old son.

As she marveled at the Friday unveiling of a Boyle Heights children’s center for low-income families, Salinas said she had been terrified of losing her clerical job downtown and was at a loss for affordable child care options.

“I thought I had no other choice,” she said, adding that the woman, luckily, proved reliable.

Parents traded such horror stories during a tour of the new Rainbow Children’s Center at the White Memorial Medical Center. The center was designed as a lifeline for working parents drowning in high child care costs.

About 9,000 parents on Los Angeles’s Eastside alone routinely struggle to find decent, affordable day care for their children, a 1998 White Memorial study estimated. Many lean on family members, while others take their chances with unlicensed sitters or simply take their kids to work with them.

The Rainbow Center, to be run by the Montebello-based Mexican American Opportunities Foundation, is only a partial solution to that problem. Of the 82 children enrolled there, half will be from families receiving state subsidies for child care. The remainder will be the children of hospital staff, who will pay as much as $150 per week in fees, officials said.

Still, community leaders and parents praised the center as a positive step against area indifference.

“The reality is, [professional child care] is not taken as seriously as it should be,” said county Supervisor Gloria Molina. She announced that the county, which helped pay for the center, will spend $1 million more on developing infant care in the area.

The Mexican American Opportunities Foundation has worked to address the child care shortage for about 25 years.

An overseer of child care programs for roughly 3,000 families in the state, the nonprofit agency offers a bicultural curriculum, sprinkling English and Spanish into lessons, while emphasizing Mexican heritage.

Perpetual funding problems have forced the organization to offer most of its programs in facilities not normally considered suitable for preschoolers, such as converted factories.

Maria Jimenez, a mother of three who struggled to keep up with child care payments of $120 per week, said the center is “truly a blessing.” At Rainbow, she’ll be paying $15 per week.