FAMILY CENTER IMPRESSES FIRST LADY; SUCCESS WITH PARENTS IN LOW-INCOME AREA HAILED AS MODEL EFFORT.

Byline: Dennis Love Daily News Staff Writer

First lady Hillary Rodham Clinton came to the perpetual urban laboratory that is Los Angeles on Monday, visiting a Westside day care and parenting center in hopes of exporting its success nationwide.

Along the way, Clinton managed to plug her husband's welfare reform efforts. She also demonstrated that although it may take a village to raise a child, it takes a small army of advance people and Secret Service agents to pull off a field trip by the first lady.

``She's really nice!'' gushed Tammi Peterson, a parent volunteer at the Mar Vista Family Center in Culver City, as she elbowed through the forest of reporters and cameras monitoring the lavender-suited Clinton's tour of the facility. ``She's asked a lot of questions about what we do here.''

What Clinton learned is that the Mar Vista center, pressed hard against a low-income housing project in a section of the city where gang activity is prevalent, has impacted families in the neighborhood by offering free schooling for parents on child-raising techniques.

While the Secret Service seemed to lurk in every doorway - one agent was accompanied by a bomb-sniffing German shepherd - Clinton listened as parents who double as workers at the center talked about how their own behavior had changed.

``I would hit my children,'' said Yolanda Bermudez, now one of the principal volunteers at the center. ``I wouldn't treat them as people . . . but I've learned that you can't give love if you're not getting love from somewhere else.''

Another volunteer, Ignacio Rosas, said when he began bringing his child to the day care center in 1995, ``I thought I would drop off my son and go home. But it wasn't like that. I finally realized that my kid wasn't the one being teached - I was the one being teached.''

Deanna Cherry, the center's development director and its only staffer not from the local community, said the parenting programs concentrate on helping mothers and fathers ``set goals and communicate with their children. It sounds fundamental, but when families are in a poverty crisis, very basic things become very difficult to accomplish.''

During a round-table discussion, Clinton said, ``This kind of approach really does work. We have to figure out ways to transplant it and make it grow . . . If welfare reform is to succeed, we have to do a better job of creating environments like this.

``We're taking a big step with welfare reform, and we're doing so because we think people will be better off if they can have the options to make choices for themselves,'' she said.

Later in Santa Monica, Clinton gave the keynote address to the 1997 National Policy Forum on Children, sponsored by the Democratic Governors Association. She recognized the Mar Vista group and urged the some 400 people there - including Mayor Richard Riordan and filmmaker Rob Reiner - to ``muster some extra energy to make sure the message keeps getting out.''

Clinton was to appear at a fund-raiser Monday night for Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-California.

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2 Photos

PHOTO (1 -- color) First lady Hillary Rodham Clinton stops to watch preschool girls playing at a makeup table at the Mar Vista Family Center.

(2) The first lady hears about the Culver City center's successes from parents and volunteers.

Bob Halvorsen/Daily News