State payments fund unlicensed care for poor children.

Amused that anyone would be interested, 82-year-old Willie Lee Johnson rattled off what her two young grandsons, 5-year-old T.J. and 3-year-old Dontre, do during the day while she cares for them in her large white wood-frame house in Englewood.

"They read, they sleep, they eat, they play," she said. "Then, they sleep again."

A lack of resources makes it difficult for her and other child-care providers in the neighborhood, she said. The library is too far. And while the park is only five blocks away, Johnson called the Southwest Side neighborhood's streets "hectic" and noted that children shouldn't make the trek by themselves.

Johnson manages to take Dontre to preschool to be with teachers and toys each day. But her grandchildren, as well as many of the neighborhood kids, spend much of their time playing in the streets or in empty lots left by the demolition of decrepit homes.

"The state needs to do better for these little black kids," she said.

Illinois has spent nearly $2 billion of its welfare reform money in the past four years helping poor parents pay for child care, and more than two-thirds of the caregivers in Cook County are like Johnson--unlicensed, shows an investigation by The Chicago Reporter.

No one is required to check on these children, nor does anyone see if they have appropriate toys or books, or if the environment is safe. The state requires that the adults providing care fill out a form promising their home is safe; care for no more than three unrelated children; and have no prior history of child abuse or neglect.

And while the law that provides the child-care subsidies was set up to offer choices to parents, many said that bureaucratic delays in payments, their work schedules, the income eligibility level--which kicks families of three out when the parent earns more than $11.50 an hour--and the lack of neighborhood child-care centers leaves them no choice. Instead, it forces them to turn to relatives and friends to watch their children while they are at work, they said.

"I say that Illinois lawmakers built the child-care subsidy system on a house of cards," said Trinita Logue, president of the Illinois Facilities Fund, a lending and real estate development organization for non-profits. "So all these children are out there in these houses, and no one knows what is going on with them."

The Reporter also found that:

* In many of Chicago's most impoverished and racially segregated areas, including Englewood, more than 90 percent of the providers were unlicensed.

* Unlicensed providers care for more than half of the county's children under 5 who qualify for the subsidy program.

* The lack of licensed child-care centers and homes is especially severe in neighborhoods where there is a boom of Latino families, according to a study of Chicago child-care needs. From 1990 to 2000, the number of Chicago's Latino children under age 5 in-creased by 34 percent, according to the 2000 census.

* Some licensed child-care centers in low-income neighborhoods are having trouble filling programs because families find it easier to use friends arid relatives than to negotiate center care.

* The proportion of Cook County's subsidized children under 5 who are in center care is about half what it is in wealthier, less racially diverse Illinois counties.

At the same time Cook County has experienced a boom in unlicensed care, evidence suggests that early education is critical, particularly for poor boys and girls, because it can affect their dropout and arrest rates.

Research shows that children are most likely to be cared for in homes economically and racially similar to their own, said Barbara T. Bowman, professor at the Erik-son Institute, a Chicago-based independent institution that trains child development professionals.

"So, if children are coming from low-income homes and are having difficulty in school, there is little reason to believe that home-based child care can improve that performance," Bowman said. "We have very good evidence that center-based child care can."

The research has moved state politicians into action. Gov. George H. Ryan and Mayor Richard M. Daley both recently announced initiatives aimed at getting more young children involved in early education programs.

But when the state designed the current subsidy program in 1997, officials knew not every child would be able to go to a child-care center, even if that is what their parents wanted, according to Randy Valenti, associate director of the Illinois Department of Human Services' child care and family services division.

"Some neighborhoods have centers, some neighborhoods don't," Valenti said.

"I don't think anyone can claim that low-income children in Englewood have the same resources that are available to children growing up in the northern suburbs," said state Sen. Barack Obama, a Democrat from Chicago's South Side. "Those differences start very early. That starts before public schools, and then those differences are magnified and reflected in the public schools."

With a finite amount of money available, Obama said, the state should look at increasing requirements for unlicensed care. Providers should be trained, and their homes should be checked to ensure they provide "a wholesome environment for the kids," he said.

Officials decided that visits to unlicensed homes were too expensive, Valenti said. They chose instead to have prospective unlicensed providers fill out a one-sheet questionnaire, asking things such as whether there is a gun in the home and, if so, where they keep it, and if the home has a fire extinguisher.

Ultimately, the state would like parents to have access to all types of care and understand the advantages and disadvantages of each, but the state has a lot left to do to reach that goal, Valenti said.

Clear Choices

On 63rd Street, one of Englewood's main thoroughfares, a crumbling skating rink has been turned into John's Evangelistic Church. Nearby stores sell milk and candy, liquor and lottery tickets. There are no toy stores or bookstores.

In some South Side neighborhoods, busy streets are spotted with storefront day-care centers with cute names like Teddy Bear, Busy Bumblebee and Cuddle Care.

But not here, where 3,649 infants, toddlers and children in Englewood have working parents and potentially needed care in 2000, according to the Illinois Facilities Fund analysis of census data.

There are six child-care centers in Englewood, with a total of 339 full-day slots for 3- to 5-year-olds, according to an analysis of state data provided to the Reporter.

Englewood is just one example Sixteen Chicago community areas each have more than 500 day-care providers--each with less than 12 percent of them licensed--who receive state subsidies, shows a Reporter analysis. All of these areas are predominantly African American or Latino, and their average median incomes in 1990 were each less than Chicago's median, according to the census. Income data for 2000 will not be released until March, according to the census bureau.

Experts said programs are not lust a place for children to go; they provide benefits that can affect entire lives. Kids in high-quality day-care centers tested higher than others-including children in their mother's care-in cognitive learning and language, according to a nationwide study of 1,364 children. They have been followed since their birth in 1991 by researchers at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

"We do know that you can intervene successfully with low-income kids and put them on a more successful trajectory in school," said Bowman.

Early childhood programs are especially important for Latino children who live in Spanish-speaking homes, said Maria Esther Lopez, development director for El Valor, a Chicago social service agency that runs several child-care and preschool programs in Latino neighborhoods. Children can have educational problems if they don't get language exposure before kindergarten.

"Due to a language barrier, and not a developmental delay, they are put into special education," she said.

But in Chicago, getting Latino children into quality child care has been a problem, said Ruby Smith, director of children services at the Chicago Department of Human Services.

Joe Neri, who did a 1999 analysis of child care in Chicago for the Illinois Facilities Fund, said many areas without childcare centers have had an increase in poor Latino families. The West Side's South Lawndale neighborhood, for instance, was once home to a large Eastern European population, but is now 83 percent Latino, according to the 2000 census.

Although 26th Street, one of the neighborhood's main boulevards, is bustling with restaurants, markets, clothing stores and taverns, it, like Englewood, lacks childcare centers.

There are 353 full-day slots in licensed child-care homes and centers available for the neighborhood's 7,253 children who may need care, according to Neri's assessment.

Veronica Soto, 36, said she waited a year before her 5-year-old daughter, Natividad, got into a licensed home. While waiting, Soto's mother cared for the girl. But Soto, who came to Chicago from Mexico 12 years ago, said she is extremely happy with the licensed home her daughter now goes to, and the woman who runs it.

"She is very professional," Soto said. "My daughter already knows how to write down her name and she is not already in kindergarten."

Yet, Soto said, there is a desperate need for better day care in her neighborhood.

"Some of the people [who] take care of [children] at home, they give you just a place to stay and watch TV and to do something that is not helping those kids," she said.

Many of El Valor's child-care and preschool programs have waiting lists of 300 children.

City officials have recognized the problem. In February 2000, Daley announced a partnership that uses $54.6 million of public and private money to build new childcare facilities in 20 of the neediest neighborhoods, according to the Illinois Facilities Fund's analysis. The City of Chicago contracted with the organization to run the Children's Capital Fund, which helps pay to build the centers. The mayor also said the city would expand half-day programs into full-day programs.

The city is making up for the state's shortcomings, said Smith of the city's Department of Human Services. "There just wasn't a dedication to [creating child-care facilities] so parents would have real choice in certain communities," she said about Illinois' subsidy plan.

Neri, who is now running the Children's Capital Fund, said the need is so great and the process of building a center so long--due to expense and red tape--that he and other advocates know many children will be left out.

Take the Jubilee Family Resource Center, which opened this fall at 3701 S. Ogden Ave. in the West Side's North Lawndale neighborhood. Getting the center up and running took two committed community organizations, five city agencies, two Illinois departments, federal Head Start money, two lending companies, an alderman, a state representative, 10 foundations, $3.7 million and five years.

"Tons of folks and many years later we finally have this center," said Richard Townsell, executive director of the Lawndale Christian Development Corp., one of the community organizations that worked on the project. The center can serve 217 children.

Open Slots

Twenty-four-year-old Joyce Wells sat on a folding chair in the Salvation Army's homeless shelter in Uptown. She described how she got there with little emotion, but her big, dark eyes appeared to hold anger and sadness.

When child care for her two boys fell through, she stopped working. She fell behind in her electric bill, her phone bill and finally her rent. Wells, with 1-year-old Jalan in her arms and 3-year-old Javaris toddling along, showed up at the shelter.

By early November, Wells said she was ready to get back on her feet. She wanted to enroll in a job-training course.

But Wells had a serious problem. All of the licensed child-care providers on the referral list given to her by her caseworker said they wanted her to pay up-front until the child-care subsidy money kicked in, possibly in six weeks.

"That is $135 a week," she said. "Where am I going to get $135 a week? I don't know what to do."

Wells abruptly left the shelter in early January without leaving a permanent address or finding a permanent job.

The payment delay is one of several logistical problems that parents said make them choose family and friends over a licensed provider or a child-care center.

Valenti said he doesn't think the state system encourages parents to use unlicensed care. He pointed out that other counties get more of their subsidized children into center care.

In Cook County in December 2001, 36 percent of the children under 5 receiving subsidies were in center care, compared to 74 percent in DuPage County and 63 percent in Kane County, according to a Reporter analysis of IDHS data. Cook County's poverty rate in 2000 was 13 percent, Kane's was 9 percent and DuPage's was 5 percent, according to the census.

State officials are puzzled about why so many families are using unlicensed care, especially in Chicago, and Valenti said that in October the state began a three-year study of the subject with the University of Illinois-Urbana.

Among the questions he would like answered: Is unlicensed care families' first choice? Are parents not accessing licensed care because going to some facilities means stepping into gang turf? Are they helping out a poor relative?

Valenti said he often gets complaints about the delayed payments. Eventually, Illinois will look at ways to solve that problem, he said.

But Valenti pointed out that, despite the complaints, many child-care providers continue to accept subsidized children.

Maria Whelan, executive director of the Day Care Action Council of Illinois, the agency that administers the subsidies in Cook County, said most parents choose unlicensed care because of changing work schedules that centers can't accommodate.

"Every week their job changes," Whelan said. "One week they are working Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, and the next week they are working the night shift on Wednesday and Thursday."

Whelan also said she suspects that low-income parents want to keep the subsidy money in the family. The state pays an unlicensed home provider $47.40 a week for each child.

"If I have two kids and my mother is watching them and we are desperately poor, we should not underestimate the lure of $95 a week of extra income into our family's economy," she said.

"The way the system is, you can take your child wherever," said Rick Baldwin, director of child-care programs for the Abrabam Lincoln Center, 3858 S. Cottage Grove Ave., which runs eight federally subsidized Head Start programs, as well as two child-care centers, on the South Side. "You can tell your girlfriend to apply for the subsidy and then you can split the check."

Discouraged Families

Baldwin said several of his programs have open slots even though they are in neighborhoods identified by the Illinois Facilities Fund as needing more care.

The state also requires that parents pay a portion of the cost of child care soon after they begin working, which is another way families are discouraged from using centers, some mothers said. While parents are billed for the portion they are supposed to cover, the child-care provider is responsible for collecting the money.

Gwendolyn Stokes said the state paid her $400 to $500 a month to watch three children and asked the mother of the children to pay $199, which Stokes considered ridiculous.

"If she could afford to give me $199 a month then she wouldn't need them to help her pay for a babysitter," she said. "See, they are not considering that she is a single parent, she has rent to pay, she has her kids in Catholic school."

Stokes said the state now pays her the full amount directly. And many other unlicensed child-care providers interviewed by the Reporter said they don't always force mothers to cover the co-payment.

And once a mother with two children earns at least $11.50 an hour or $24,000 a year, she doesn't qualify for the subsidy. This means, experts said, that many of these mothers can't make ends meet.

Nya Berry, president and chief executive officer of Lutheran Family Mission, a social service agency with several West Side child-care centers, said without the subsidy mothers are often forced to take children out of center care. That leaves the center with open slots and mothers scrambling to find affordable child care.

It also takes the children away from the people they know.

"It is really tragic for the children," Berry said. "At this age, consistency is one of the most important things."

The low cutoff level did not account for unskilled mothers who were able to find jobs that paid good hourly wages during the booming economy of the mid-1990s, said Smith.

"The landscape changed, and we were unprepared for it," she said.

Murky Future

When Congress in 1996 passed the welfare reform law--the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act--advocates for the poor cringed. The program it created, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), allowed states to spend welfare money in ways they deemed necessary, and established a strict time limit for how long people could get federal benefits.

Advocates worried that women would not get jobs within the 60-month time limit, and that these mothers and their children would end up on the street.

In Illinois, lawmakers decided to stop the clock and slowly peel back support as a woman's earnings increased. The state reported cutting its welfare rolls by 78 percent since 1997.

But the future of welfare reform and the child-care program is murky.

Unlike other states, which saved some of their welfare money for a so-called "rainy day," Illinois officials reported to the federal government that they had already spent all the federal money- bout $585 million for each year since 1997. Child care is Illinois' largest TANF expenditure.

Now, with a recession looming and government budget surpluses dwindling, the "rainy day" is here, said Sharon Parrott, co-director of the federal welfare policy program for the Washington D.C.-based Center on Budget and Policy Priories.

But, she wondered, "are they going to need to retrench in efforts like child care because they will need more of their money for cash assistance?"

Jerry Stermer, president of Voices for Illinois Children, said he and other advocates had applauded Illinois for spending all of its welfare money to support working families. But now they are worried.

"Because we did better than other states in spending all the money, we are now at risk," he said.

Congress will reconsider welfare reform legislation and funding during its upcoming session. Many Democratic and Republican lawmakers believe child-care and work programs were good uses of welfare money, Parrott said.

Still, no one is sure how the gloomy economic outlook will affect federal welfare reform funding. "We don't know how congressmen are going to react," Parrott said.

While Illinois officials, lawmakers and advocates wait for the funding to shake out, the debate on child care continues around issues such as the effects of unlicensed care versus center care, the definition of quality child care and the role of early childhood education.

Valenti, along with many advocates, stressed that unlicensed care is not bad. He pointed to women like Johnson, who take children to preschool.

Johnson, though, said the child-care subsidy is her only income besides Social Security and food stamps. It isn't much to live on, she said, let alone to provide extra money for the children or outings. But she added that she loves children and finds a way to make it.

"It is just what the poor do," she said.

Whelan, from the Day Care Action Council of Illinois, said her agency works hard with unlicensed providers to make sure they have the things they need. Two "Quality Count Vans" go to places that draw unlicensed providers, Whelan said.

From the vans, parents and providers can pick up books and brochures about child care. The council also contracts with seven community organizations to offer providers classes on subjects like teaching arts and crafts.

Valenti said the future state child-care subsidy program should emphasize linking unlicensed providers with community resources and helping them understand that education is important in child development.

"And it doesn't matter, from a statistical or quality point of view, how well you read," he said. "The fact that you're sitting down with a child on your lap, opening a book, telling a story, whether it's good English, bad English, whether it's pronounced correctly or mispronounced, that is not as important as the connection between having a book, going down the page top to bottom, left to right."

Bowman agreed children don't need to spend "all day, every day with someone who has a Ph.D." But research suggests some sort of structured program, taught by a teacher for at least a couple of hours, a couple of days a week, is helpful for a child's future.

"We need to figure out how to give kids access to the people who can give them ideas--intellectually challenging ideas--that grow their minds," she said.

Ryan convened a task force in April 2001 to look at the issue of universal access to preschool. He plans to direct the group later this year to design a specific plan, said Wanda Taylor, deputy press secretary for Ryan.

Stermer stressed that the quality of care matters as much as the amount. "Child care should not be exclusively about mothers going to work," said Stermer. "In study after study, children do better in school if they go to a good quality preschool program. If we don't get them into one, it is a missed opportunity."

Stermer added: "We continue to ask the question, 'Why can't Johnny read?' and the answer to that question lies in the child's experience birth to 5."

Contributing: Tim Bush. Jocelyn Prince and Josh Drobnyk helped research this article.

Unregulated Explosion

The state of Illinois' support for child care in Cook County has soared
over the last four years, particularly for unlicensed providers. Since
1998, when the state implemented a program to help poor people pay for
child care, the number of unlicensed providers receiving state money has
grown by 71 percent, and the number of child-care centers by 49 percent.

      Unlicensed   Licensed
      child-care  child-care
      providers   providers

1998    15,311       4,152
1999    26,492       7,428
2000    35,069      10,617
2001    36,822      12,608

Notes: Data are for fiscal years, which run from July 1 to June 30.
'Unlicensed' providers care for three or fewer children and don't have
to meet certain minimum standards, such as maintaining certain
child-to-adult ratios or covering electrical outlet. Data do not include
children sewed in Chicago Department of Human Services child-care
programs. Of the county's 1,033 child-care centers, about 68 percent
accept subsidies.

Sources: Illinois Department of Human Services; Illinois Kids Count
2002; analyzed by The Chicago Reporter.

Note: Table made from bar graph