DEAR EDITOR:
I wanted to comment on the article published in The Dispatch on
Wednesday, Oct. 29
”
Nursery School’s Money Woes.
”
DEAR EDITOR:
I wanted to comment on the article published in The Dispatch on Wednesday, Oct. 29 “Nursery School’s Money Woes.”
My name is Cathy Boettcher, and I am the deputy director at Go Kids, Inc. a large non-profit child development agency headquartered in Gilroy. We provide care to 1,200 children each year in South County, San Benito County, Santa Cruz and Monterey counties. Approximately 80 percent of the families we serve receive subsidies from the California Department of Education because their income falls below 75 percent of the state median income limit.
We have noticed a significant decrease in the number of families who qualify for our services due to the mass exodus of families leaving Santa Clara County for the Central Valley. For the first time in my eight years with the agency we have started an outreach campaign to recruit families for our waiting list (which usually contains 300-plus families).
At present we have less than 30 families waiting, and many of those are families about to give birth, and are not ready yet for care when we call them. The economy has not only affected child care and “nursery schools” for full-paying customers, but it has affected the subsidized childcare industry as well. I’m not sure if families assume we still have a long waiting list, and thus don’t call or the families just are no longer here.
We are always taking “low-income” families for our wait list, and the “wait” is short. We experience attrition every August and September because of preschoolers going off to kindergarten, so we tend to enroll 100 children from the wait list to replace those transitioning to school.
This year we placed every eligible family waiting, and now are working to build the wait list up again so when we have drops, or open new centers we can enroll more families.
Cathy Boettcher, Gilroy
Submitted Tuesday, Dec. 2 to ed****@ga****.com
