Getting child care at UCLA is no walk in the park

Though Sarah Ervin’s baby is not due till the end of the month, she has already placed herself on the waiting list for the UCLA childcare centers, the Psychology Department, and has met with a resource director to see about other centers in the Westside area.

Ervin, a staff member in the Government and Community Relations office at UCLA, is one of the many parents who continually look to campus staff and centers for help finding child care within and outside of the university.

“I’ve heard from other parents that the scariest moment is when you leave the hospital and you go, “˜This is our responsibility now?'” she said.

It may be months or years until Ervin hears back from the centers about an opening, but for the few who are able to secure a spot, the bonds formed at the centers continue for many years.

As the largest of the UCLA campus’s three child care centers, the Krieger Child Care Center is located on the northwest part of campus at the end of a small road. The center houses toys, a tire swing and a few slides, as well as classrooms for infants, toddlers and preschool children.

It is in this building and in other university centers that a community in and of its own has developed, almost unintentionally, said Gay MacDonald, executive director of the Early Care and Education program which oversees the centers.

“(It) becomes not family “¦ but it becomes a community. It’s closeness, a connectedness,” she said, referring to the networks of parents at the center. Parents, she said, sometimes babysit for one another or simply swap stories about their children. MacDonald said children who have attended the centers and who later attended university still continue to be friends through the years, even though their school choices and career paths may be different.

She added that after 18 years of working at the center, she still remembers the families that walk through its doors. She recalls how, after reading the presidential scholar’s list at a campus event, she recognized a name.

“As I looked at the (presidential scholar’s) list, I saw the name of a woman who had been a young single mother (who received child care at the center),” she said, pointing to the classroom where the woman’s baby boy was cared for.

The Krieger center has seen more than its fair share of anxious parents who have come seeking child care in the roughly two decades that the center has been in service. But MacDonald remembers clearly how the young mother arrived at the center. “Her eyes were wide as saucers and she was starting the science program at UCLA,” she said.

That list of names updated MacDonald on the life of a woman who she remembered very well, like most other families who go through the center. It was an example of how meaningful the center’s work is for the staff. If the family is successful, then the whole community is successful, MacDonald said.

“We do kind of see a larger than life vision of how important our work is,” she said.

That vision is carried out by a staff of experienced teachers and students who are interested in child development or social work, and are fueled by the opportunities for staff members to develop their skills, MacDonald said.

Judith Bencivengo, the coordinator for the UCLA Child Care Resource Program, has for decades scouted all of the neighborhood childcare centers in the Westside. While her work centers on helping families seek child care off campus, she said that the campus’s centers offer a realm of opportunities for staff who work there, a key aspect in finding any good location.

“Teachers want to grow and that’s one of the real joys of the UCLA program. Teachers are given many opportunities to grow. It’s a smorgasbord of things to choose from,” she said.

The opportunities for development are there. More than a third of the current staff at the centers began as students or interns, MacDonald said, with two becoming directors of the centers.

But for MacDonald, dealing with the sometimes frantic calls from parents who can’t make it into the center isn’t about being too polite. She said that once she spoke with a young mother who was in need of child care for her newborn but did not qualify for a spot because her housing arrangements had fallen through. That’s when, MacDonald said, it became more about being a friend and counselor, not an administrator.