Parents’ day care bind
As costs soar, S.F. pressured to help families that are forced to sacrifice
When Julie Panebianco began scouting for preschools in San Francisco three years ago, the choices were tantalizing: Mandarin immersion programs. Big outdoor play areas. Organic snacks. Montessori or Waldorf philosophies.
But all of them were far too expensive for Panebianco, a high school teacher and mother of two whose husband designs characters for video games. She counted herself lucky to find a school in the Sunset that charged less than $1,300 a month — below average for the city — because it had just opened for business.
“Now that school has a huge waiting list, and the price went up significantly,” said Panebianco, who lives in the Upper Haight.
She’s among the many parents confronting a scarcity of affordable child care in San Francisco, where centers charge up to $2,605 a month for an infant, according to a 2016 report by the city controller, and home-based day cares charge up to $1,850.
Some parents say they’ve had to make tough sacrifices, bringing their babies to work, racking up credit card debt, sending kids to live with distant relatives or leaving the workforce altogether. And some say that it doesn’t matter whether
they can pay for day care or not, because most places are booked.
Now pressure is building on the city’s government to help.
On Monday, the Board of Supervisors’ Land Use and Transportation Committee will vote on legislation by Supervisors Norman Yee and Katy Tang to ease the permitting process for day care and preschool facilities. These schools and centers now have to obtain conditional use permits to open in many neighborhoods, which Yee says is expensive and timeconsuming, and limits the city’s supply of an essential service.
Separately, child care advocates are pushing the city to set aside $10 million in its next budget to fund education programs for young children.
Yet such measures are small and incremental for an industry that’s being hit on all sides. Many day care centers are getting squeezed by high rents, which force some to shut down and others to raise fees. At the same time, the child care labor force is shrinking: A recent survey by the city’s Child Care Planning and Advisory Council showed that more than a third of centers can’t enroll to their full capacity because they don’t have enough teachers — the jobs pay too little to justify getting the credentials or cover the cost of living in San Francisco.
“Right now, early childhood (care) is paid for by teachers having really low wages, or parents’ fees going up,” said Sara Hicks-Kilday, director of the San Francisco Child Care Providers’ Association.
Salaries for preschool teachers with master’s degrees go as low as $23,000 a year, which is “nowhere near the minimum survival wage in San Francisco,” said Gretchen Ames, Bay Area regional coordinator for the California Child Care Resource & Referral Network — a nonprofit working to boost the state’s supply of affordable child care.
Ames said the low wages are causing San Francisco to hemorrhage child care workers, and putting severe strains on the ones who stay. Some drive in from as far away as Vallejo, she said. Others cannot afford to put their own children in child care. Still others juggle multiple jobs.
“I’m constantly looking at ways to balance all these needs in the early childhood field,” said Yee, who successfully sponsored a law last year imposing new developer impact fees to fund child care facilities.
“You have children who need high-quality care, but their families can’t afford it,” Yee said. “You have the professionals who provide this stuff, but they’re the lowest-paid educators. And then, even when we get some funding to increase services, we run into the problem of where to put them.”
Although San Francisco has long been the butt of jokes for having more dogs than children, the city has actually done more than many of its neighbors to help needy families. In the 1990s San Francisco became the first city in the country to invest local dollars in child care subsidies, combining city funds with federal and state money. Those subsidies are based on a family’s gross income: A single parent earning up to $3,800 a month can get the city to pick up most of the tab.
But there is plenty of competition. In March, the wait list had 2,630 infants and toddlers.
Parents who don’t get help are left making painful decisions. Some in the city’s immigrant communities wind up sending their kids overseas to live with grandparents, said Maria Luz Torre, an organizer for the grassroots group Parent Voices. Decades ago, Torre sent her children back to the Philippines while trying to set up her life in San Francisco.
Other parents reluctantly leave the workforce to stay home with their kids.
“I loved my job, I loved my bosses, I loved my co-workers,” said Mari Villaluna, a single mother and disabled Army veteran who worked as a counselor for high school students with disabilities. Villaluna applied for a child care subsidy months before her baby was born. By the time her maternity leave ended in September, the subsidy still hadn’t come through.
“So I showed up to work with my baby,” she said. “And they decided that for liability reasons, I couldn’t do that.”
She lost her job in December. When the subsidy finally came in March, she was unable to use it because she was unemployed.
Some parents, such as Willow Lancaster, a mother of three who lives in Bernal Heights, get by on credit card debt. Lancaster has a city voucher that pays all but $500 a month for her 9-year-old daughter’s summer programs. She takes home $3,000 a month as a public health employee and pays $2,000 a month in rent — which leaves about $500 for everything else.
Then there are parents stuck in the middle strata: They don’t qualify for financial aid, but they can’t afford most day cares and preschools.
“We are, I guess, in the middle class, but we don’t make enough money to pay for these programs,” said Christine Nevarez, a mother of three who runs an early childhood education program at San Francisco State University. Her two sons attend day care on the university campus, and her daughter goes to transitional kindergarten in the Mission District. Nevarez’s husband is a police officer who often works double shifts to cover the cost of day care and the family’s mortgage in Glen Park.
Panebianco and her husband, Jon Gregory, have survived by staggering their work schedules — he goes in late after dropping their children off in the Richmond and Sunset districts; she comes home early to pick them up. They’ve crammed the whole family into a rent-controlled, one-bedroom apartment on Clayton Street, converting the laundry room into a bedroom for 1-year-old Niko and putting 4-year-old Daisy in the nook that used to be Jon’s office.
Even so, they’ve considered following the migratory path of many other families, out to the less-expensive East Bay.
“We love it here, but we can’t take vacations, and we’re staying in this tiny apartment,” Panebianco said. “And paying for child care on my salary, we just scrape by.”