by Jill Cannon

For full report click here.

Recent welfare reform has significantly increased work requirements for welfare recipients. Due to this change, it is expected there will be a significant increase in the demand for full-time, year- round child care. The County of Los Angeles anticipates that potential increased demand for child care is greater than known supply (i.e., licensed child care). License-exempt care (e.g., relatives, friends, neighbors) is extremely difficult to quantify, and the supply is unknown to administrators. Yet adequate child care supply, both licensed and license-exempt, is necessary for the successful implementation of work requirements and to help move families off welfare. Parents who cannot find reasonably available child care may be temporarily excused from work requirements.

Crystal Stairs, the county's largest child care Resource and Referral agency/Alternative Payment Provider, has numerous welfare families in its service area. In order to help administer child care services to  these families, Crystal Stairs has an interest in analyzing the known child care supply and potential new demand to get an indication of the potential supply shortage.

The intent of this report is to estimate the magnitude of the licensed supply shortage in the Crystal Stairs service area and to recommend broad action to help meet welfare reform policy goals. With regard to child care, the policy goal is to ensure there is enough child care to enable parents to meet increased welfare reform work requirements. To do this, child care may be licensed or license-exempt, it must be within a reasonable distance from parents' home or work, it must provide care for all hours parents will be engaged in work-related activities (generally full-time), and it must be safe and dependable. Because licensed care is known to Crystal Stairs, it is the focus of this analysis. Also, it is assumed parents will want child care near their homes, and zip codes are used as a geographic  indicator.

This report uses secondary analysis of existing data and imposes general statistical and geographic information system (GIS) analysis to arrive at a conclusion about supply and demand. The supply data  was gathered from Crystal Stairs’ CareFinder database, and the demand data is from the county’s Department of Public Social Services database, based on September 1997 Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) caseload data.

Key Findings

• In the Crystal Stairs service area, potential demand far exceeds current licensed supply. Current vacant supply meets only 11% of the potential demand from children eligible for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).

• The supply and demand gap is greatest for infant and school-aged care, with 8% and 6% of potential need met, respectively. While preschool supply is greater, it will only meet 22% of potential new demand.

• Current capacity serves predominantly preschool-age children (68%), while potential new TANF demand will be largely school-aged children (52%).

• Centers are operating at much lower vacancy rates than family child care homes (14% and 41%, respectively).

• Zip codes with the largest numbers of TANF children (90001, 90002, 90003, 90011, 90037, 90044, 90059, and 90250) have very low percentages of potential need met through current vacancies. Many of these zip codes have 5% or less of potential demand met and over 2,500 TANF children.

• Potential need met in the eastern portion of the service area, South-Central, and one area in Inglewood (zip codes 90001, 90002, 900003, 90011, 90015, 90037, 90058, 90059, and 90304) is  consistently lowest for all age groups.

• Vacancies with Spanish-speaking providers are extremely low¾ 3% or less¾ in zip codes where over 50% of AFDC recipients indicate Spanish as their primary home language (90001, 90011, 90015,  90058, 90304). Overall, only 5% of potential new demand is met  through vacancies providing care in Spanish.

• Weekend child care capacity meets only 4% of potential new demand, not accounting for current capacity already being used.

• Nighttime child care capacity meets only 1% of potential new demand, not accounting for current capacity already being used.

In order to provide a full range of choices to parents, as well as to lessen the circumstances leading to temporary work exemptions, the licensed child care supply in the Crystal Stairs service area will need to be greatly increased. Unless a conscious effort is made to increase supply, Crystal Stairs will be limited in the help it can provide its clients in finding child care, and many TANF parents will find it difficult to meet their welfare reform work requirements due to the lack of reasonably available care. Ultimately, this child care problem could limit the effectiveness of welfare reform.

 
Based on the analysis of data, several broad actions are recommended to build licensed capacity in the service area to lessen the gap between known supply and potential demand:

• Target school-aged and infant care specifically, while recognizing all age groups will benefit from increased supply.

• Focus efforts to increase supply in or near the zip codes with the largest numbers of TANF children and the lowest vacant supply.

• Target supply of care during nonstandard hours when many TANF recipients will need to work.

• Target supply of care in Spanish, particularly in zip codes with large percentages of Spanish- speaking TANF recipients.