City Looks At Contracting Out Childcare

Two private childcare services providers have shown interest in taking over Hercules’ city-run daycare program.

Champions and the YMCA were the only organizations to respond to the city’s requests for proposals from private companies to take over the city’s childcare program.

Hercules runs childcare facilities at all three of its elementary schools--, and . It put its childcare program, which offers before and after school care, out to bid at the direction of the Hercules Finance Subcommittee and Citizens Financial Advisory Ad Hoc Committee following an aggressive citywide budget crunch that started in March.

At that time, the committees asked the Parks and Recreation Department, which runs the program, to do a thorough cost-benefit analysis of the childcare program, and look into the possibility letting private companies to take over the program in order to save cost to the general fund.

“Before we were subsidizing childcare, now were not,” said Parks and Recreation Director Pedro Jimenez. Before restructuring as part of the budget crunch, the city was subsidizing  the childcare program between $70,000 and $100,000 annually. After the crunch, the program became cost neutral by increasing rates and laying off employees, Jimenez said. Rates went from roughly $5 to $6 an hour per child, and layoffs were felt department-wide.

If private companies do take over, Jimenez said rates and adult-student ratios are expected to stay the same.

Jimenez presented on the city-run childcare program as well as the offers by the YMCA and Kinder Care to the Finance Subcommittee and Citizens Financial Advisory Ad Hoc Committee in September.

The committees asked for Jimenez to return at a later meeting with a breakdown of costs associated with either keeping or contracting out the city’s childcare. Jimenez is scheduled to present to committees on the city’s childcare situation at the next meeting, which is scheduled for October 18.