This a is one of the reason Los Angeles has a one-billion-dollar deficit, and growing. When did the city, unable to provide fire hydrants to protect homes, using law enforcement to protect illegal aliens, can not tell how $2 billion was spent on the homeless crisis, think they could run pre-schools. Pre-school is a fancy term for babysitting. Is that the role of a city government to be a baby sitter?
“In 2021, the city of Los Angeles took some of its COVID-19 relief money and put it toward a big plan: expanding and running its own childcare centers.
The City Council approved $20 million dollars of American Rescue Plan Act federal funds to renovate and reopen 10 licensed preschools at Recreation and Parks facilities. It highlighted a persistent problem that became all the more acute during the pandemic: There is not enough licensed childcare in Los Angeles. The plan, according to the City Council, was to expand options for working families in low-income neighborhoods.”
Were they not smart enough to know in a year or two that money would run out—but still have the facilities? I would not trust any of these government officials to run a hot dog stand. Yet, they decided to go into the babysitting business. Now, the money has run out and many families are inconvenienced. How many other businesses did they start during COVID that no longer have financing? We will know soon as they close down.
LA invested millions in preschools. Less than four years later, it’s offloading most. What happened?
By Libby Rainey, LA1st, 5/28/25 https://laist.com/news/education/early-childhood-education-pre-k/los-angeles-invested-millions-city-preschools-closing-offloading
Los Angeles renovated and relaunched licensed childcare centers using federal pandemic relief money. Less than four years later, the city says it doesn’t have the money to keep running them.
In 2021, the city of Los Angeles took some of its COVID-19 relief money and put it toward a big plan: expanding and running its own childcare centers.
The City Council approved $20 million dollars of American Rescue Plan Act federal funds to renovate and reopen 10 licensed preschools at Recreation and Parks facilities. It highlighted a persistent problem that became all the more acute during the pandemic: There is not enough licensed childcare in Los Angeles. The plan, according to the City Council, was to expand options for working families in low-income neighborhoods.
Fast forward four years and the city says it doesn’t have the money to continue operating the majority of its preschools and is looking for new providers to take them over.
Along the way, the city missed its deadlines to reopen the centers, had more vacancies than seats filled, and never charged for the programs, despite city officials saying they never intended to run them for free. The city received a state grant to provide care for low-income children ages 2 to 3, but city staffers said they couldn’t actually use the funding at the new preschools because they weren’t open enough hours in the day.
Two of the centers never reopened at all.
Now, parents say they’ve spent months trying to get answers from the city, and the responses have only made them angrier.
”It’s an epic failure,” said Lisa Shaughnessy, whose son attends one of the preschools. “They just blew through the money, didn’t budget for anything, didn’t plan for anything, and when they ran out of money, they said, ‘Oh, sorry, program’s gone.'”
The city says it has around $750,000 left to keep running the centers. After that, what remains is laid out in the city’s 2025-26 proposed budget, which sets aside $1.62 million for continuing care at the remaining city-run preschools.
That represents just a tiny fraction of the Recreation and Parks Department’s proposed budget: under 0.5%. Compared to the city’s total budget, the number is just 0.01%.
The rapid expansion and contraction of funds has led some to wonder why the city moved forward with reopening its child care centers, and if there was a long-term plan at all.
“ It’s really a bad idea to use one-time money for ongoing services,” said Kay Hartman, a member of the Neighborhood Council Budget Advocates. “Because it will always get you into budget trouble.”
Others pointed out that American Rescue Plan Act dollars were short-term, emergency funds for a time of unprecedented crisis. The federal government poured more money into the childcare sector than the U.S. had seen since World War II. But it was never intended to be a long-term solution for endemic problems like lack of access to affordable child care.
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“ We knew that it was never going to be funding that would be transformational for the system,” said Arabella Bloom with the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment. “It was very much kind of a Band-Aid to protect the sector during this really stressful time.”
In an email, a spokesperson for Rec and Parks said the city had used the federal funds to successfully renovate nine preschools and re-open eight of them. She pointed to rising operational costs and budget constraints as the reason city services couldn’t continue.
“The city remains committed to ensuring that working families have access to safe, affordable, and high-quality childcare at these facilities by partnering with qualified early education service providers,” she said.
Preschool openings were repeatedly delayed
The 10 centers that L.A. chose to reopen during the pandemic had been city-run preschools before, but they shuttered during the Great Recession. After 2008, Recreation and Parks ran just two preschool programs.
The city’s goal was to renovate some of the previously closed spaces and make them operational again by July 2023, according to a 2022 report from the city administrative officer, which oversees the management of COVID-19 federal funds.
The city missed that deadline. As of June 2023, the city had opened just two of the 10 locations. More than 260 families had filled out forms expressing interest in the programs, and 100 had submitted applications. But the preschools were serving just 16 children.
“Due to construction delays and challenges onboarding resources, the number of children intended to have been served by this point is below performance goals,” the report from the city administrative officer reads. A Recreation and Parks spokesperson also said licensing the preschools led to delays.
That report laid out a new intended date for the preschools to be fully operational and licensed: April 2024. Yet another report published three months after that April date found that four of the 10 preschools still weren’t open. Just 29% of the seats at the centers that had reopened were full — 79 out of 272 seats. The city had received more than 750 interest forms from families looking for child care.
That same report laid out a new timeline for opening all the preschools: 2025. In the same document, the city named two dates: January 2025 and June 2025. Two of the centers — Banning Child Care Center and Van Ness Child Care Center — are still not open. And they’re not opening anytime soon: Representatives with L.A.’s Recreation and Parks Department say they’ll soon begin the search for non-city providers to run eight of the preschools, including the two that never re-opened.
I was so excited to look at these beautiful centers that opened up. We wanted this to succeed.
— LaShon Tillie-Jones, Recreation and Parks Department
“ The department does not have funding to continue operating and maintaining the centers that we opened back up,” said Chinyere Stoneham, an assistant general manager for Recreation and Parks who has overseen the child care centers for about a year.
The city has repeatedly told parents at the affected centers that there will be a “smooth transition” for families with children at the preschool, but the timeline they’ve presented tells a different story.
The mayor’s office told LAist that federal funds for the childcare centers will be fully used up by late fall 2025. In meetings with parents and childcare providers, other city officials said that the process of finding and contracting outside providers for the newly renovated facilities will take until at least January 2026 to complete. The new entities will also need to obtain licenses from the state of California, a process that can take months.
So on a recent call for childcare operators interested in moving into the centers, one city representative said what had until then been only hinted at: The transition means that the centers would need to temporarily close.
“We have a meeting scheduled with Community Care Licensing to discuss the details of the transition and explore ways to minimize disruption to childcare services,” a spokesperson for Rec and Parks said in an email.
Some parents with kids at the centers say this means they have to look for new preschool options on short notice.
“ The communication has been exceptionally disappointing,” said Catherine Gillespie-Vargas, whose 3-year-old attends one of the centers. “Most parents have had to make decisions on where their child is going for the next academic year. Like the timeline has passed.”
At a recent parent meeting at Evergreen Child Care Center in Boyle Heights, Recreation and Parks employee LaShon Tillie-Jones, who manages the child care program, responded to parent concerns.
“I was so excited to look at these beautiful centers that opened up. We wanted this to succeed, but with budget cuts we just can’t do it. I apologize for that,” she said. “We probably should have provided information earlier on.”
What happened?
It’s unclear if the city ever intended to keep running all the preschools it invested in long-term. The majority of federal funds went into renovating the buildings, not running the actual programs. But from the beginning, city officials said the city centers faced issues with staffing. Tillie-Jones, who manages the child care program, said the centers were never staffed to capacity, due to struggles with recruitment.
Rose Watson, a spokesperson for Recreation and Parks, said that the city wasn’t able to use a grant from the California Department of Social Services because it required the centers to operate between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m.
“The funding has not been utilized at the eight sites due to the inability to hire the appropriate number of staff to expand out the hours of operation and keep the required supervision ratios,” Watson said in an email.
She said grant funding has been used to support families at the city’s two long-standing preschools.
Arabella Bloom with the Berkeley research center said the staffing issues mirror broader trends in the child care industry, which struggles to recruit and maintain staff due to low wages.
“ This example demonstrates pretty clearly that we can’t grow the supply of childcare without growing the childcare workforce,” she said. “A lot of times, programs might have an empty classroom just sitting there where they could serve however many more kids, but they don’t have a teacher to fill that slot.”
According to the budget blue book, child care associates working for the city make between $41,843 and $62,911 a year. At the low end, that’s around $20 an hour.
Staffing issues weren’t the only hiccup. The city also didn’t charge for its new programs, so all families were attending for free regardless of income. Multiple parents told LAist they would have paid for the service if it made the programs sustainable.
Even the city’s website represents the aspirational version of the centers rather than the reality. It lists opening hours for all the centers as 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., even though multiple centers keep shorter hours.
The programs never had the chance to reach full hours or capacity. By last year, the plan to remove the new preschools from city control was already in motion. Mayor Karen Bass directed the Recreation and Parks Department to make a plan to transition the childcare operations to non-city providers, including a timeline and cost comparisons. More than a year later, that report has still not been produced.
What will the new providers look like?
Recreation and Parks staff say that transitioning the preschools to non-city providers will allow the city spaces to continue providing child care to Angelenos. Some parents expressed skepticism about the plan.
“ They laid out all the problems they’ve had and why it was so difficult to operate, and now they just expect us to believe that a third party will come in and not have any of those problems?” Shaughnessy said.
Recreation and Parks officials said the city won’t charge rent at the facilities to help providers keep costs down, and will require whoever operates the facilities to charge below market rate for tuition and fees. It’s unclear if that means they’ll be affordable.
One example of how the programs may look after the transition is the Joy Picus Child Development Center, a privately run program in L.A.’s City Hall. It charges $1,372 a month for preschool-aged children, with a slight discount for city employees.
City staff also said at one parent meeting that they’ll start charging at the new centers that will remain under city control — $300 a week, or $1,200 a month, with considerations based on income. For comparison, the Los Angeles Unified School District’s early education centers charge a maximum of around $500 a month. An LAUSD spokesperson said they were unaware of the city’s preschool programs and the plan to close them until reading about it in the news.
A lost opportunity
As the end of the city’s free childcare programs looms, parents who still have kids there say the programs represent a lost opportunity for Los Angeles. Multiple families told LAist that they loved the preschools, adored the city staff there and felt proud to be bringing their children to a successful city program.
“We all found a gem of a preschool,” said Lucia Fabio, who has a child at one of the childcare centers. “ This is working and it’s working well.”
Last year, the city surveyed around half of the parents at the preschools, and 100% said they were satisfied or very satisfied with the program quality.
“We missed the chance as a city to do something that almost no one else is doing,” said parent Xavier Vargas. “There’s this social acknowledgement [that] this is a fundamental core right. That if people want to work, they have a place to be able to afford child care. And we just dropped it.”
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