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With 80 percent of New Orleans' licensed child-care centers gone, neighborhoods citywide are lacking a basic service that could impede the city's economic rebirth, according to a study released today.
"Child care is critical to an economic recovery and a recovery in general," said Kate Conradt of the Washington, D.C., advocacy group Save the Children, an international nonprofit that commissioned the study to identify ways to work with state and local leaders to improve child care for working parents.
Before the storm, the city had 1,912 day-care slots at 266 licensed centers, according to the Early Childhood Institute at Mississippi State University, which conducted the study. Now 80 percent of those centers and 75 percent of those slots are gone.
But the problem is not irrevocable.
Thus far Save the Children, working with Chevron Corp. and MSU, has helped rebuild 72 child-care centers on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, said Jeanne-Aimee DeMarrais, who coordinates Save the Children's work in Katrina-affected areas.
The group also is working with officials from the Louisiana Department of Social Services to help identify public and private financing and create a similar plan for New Orleans.
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University of New Orleans Chancellor Tim Ryan, who has been advising Mayor Ray Nagin on economic development issues, said good-quality day care is critical to any successful economy, and the issue is very much on the mayor's radar.
"You have to have adequate child care to bring out most of the labor force, and that's especially true if you're a city like New Orleans that has a lot of single-parent families," he said. "People can't work if they don't have adequate child care."
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Today's study, in fact, recommends restoring neighborhood child-care centers, as well as neighborhood schools, to "simplify schedules and transportation for these fragile families."
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According to the study, the city still lacks any coordinated plan for returning child care to neighborhoods that need it most.
The study says 33 of 61 neighborhoods lost all their licensed day-care centers, while another 19 neighborhoods lost at least some day-care slots.
Several neighborhoods completely lacking licensed child care have already shown strong signs of recovery, including Bywater and Broadmoor, while areas such as Central City, Mid-City and Uptown have lost 60 percent or more of their centers, according to the report.
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Although the study did not include unlicensed child-care services operated in private homes, known as family child care, [executive director of the local nonprofit Agenda for Children Judy] Watts said the city needs to focus on creating more capacity there.
"Family child care is not coming back fast enough," Watts said. "It can take a year or two to get licensed as a center, but in a few months you can get a family site registered and opened."
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Nancy Freeman of the Institute of Mental Hygiene in New Orleans said centers need not only financing to reopen but also to prepare for a new state-imposed quality-rating system that will provide parents with information about how the centers meet various standards.
The MSU study suggested that the new system "could provide new incentives for child care programs in the Katrina disaster area to strive for quality."
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- reprinted from the Times-Picayune