Where’S Child Care Nights, Weekends?

Hard-to-find day care got harder to find last week in Spokane.

State officials closed a private center, acting on reports that toddlers had wandered away from it. One 2-year-old was found unattended beside the coursing river of traffic on North Division, a block away.

That’s a chilling picture. Here’s another:

A single mom who’s been leaving her own toddler at the shutdown center now has to find someplace else that takes kids during her evening and weekend shifts. There are none - at least none that she can get to, and afford - but she has this unemployed, live-in boyfriend. …

Let’s all hope that made-up scene doesn’t play itself out for any of the 150 youngsters displaced by the closure. But if it does, and experience shows it’s plausible, let’s hope none of them become victims of the kind of domestic horrors The Spokesman-Review and other newspapers report too often. Parents shouldn’t have to choose the lesser of various risks, but they do because of inadequate day-care resources.

The problem is especially acute for people who work nights or weekends, the very shifts that low-income parents must take as they try to get off public assistance. And if the child is an infant the shortage is even more severe.

Before it closed, the Northtown Child Care Center was one of only four in Spokane County that operated during night and weekend hours.

When Washington state enacted welfare reform and hundreds of low-income mothers were required to seek employment, a number of day-care providers did extend their hours, but they were overwhelmed by difficulties such as the unpredictability of their clients’ variable schedules.

Gradually, says Kathy Thamm, program manager for Family Care Resources, most of them returned to their standard schedules.

Why? Some explanations seem obvious, but the issue is complex enough that the Washington state Child Care Resource and Referral Network has conducted a study that will, members hope, lead to sound solutions.

In the meantime, Thamm would like to see a group of local care providers get together with some of the community’s keener business minds and work out a strategy to make evening and weekend child care viable from both a business and societal point of view.

That’s a promising approach. If it succeeds, we could move on to the next challenge: providing child care that not only meets low-income kids’ basic survival needs but gives them the intellectual preparation to enter school on an even footing with their peers.