What Happened with Kids Corner?
My wife and I moved to Palos Verdes specifically for the high quality schools here. In order to be able to afford to live in this community, she and I both have full-time jobs. Thankfully both our jobs have enough flexibility that we can occasionally do a personal task during the workday. That came in handy on Monday July 15th at 9:31am when I received a text from my wife saying that registration for Kids Corner had opened.
Kids Corner is a program run by PVPUSD that provides care and supervision for elementary students before and after school. The normal school day starts at 8:30am and ends anywhere from 12pm to 3pm depending on a number of factors. For many working parents, before-school and after-school care are absolutely necessary in order to be able to work at their jobs. Many parents count on Kids Corner to provide that service.
When I received the text from my wife, I stopped what I was doing and immediately logged onto the district’s website to sign up. I had learned from friends that space fills up quickly and that registrations are processed in the order they are received. Speaking with several people afterward, I learned that some parents were driving when the email was sent out so they pulled over to the side of the road to sign up on their phones. Other parents I spoke to did not have that flexibility: they were with clients or otherwise occupied with their work, which resulted in them not getting to the registration website until hours later.
After a few nerve-wracking days, my wife and I learned that our application had been approved. We were some of the lucky ones. Word began circulating that multiple families had been placed on the waitlist. Many parents reached out to me directly as a school board candidate and asked me to look into the situation. I wrote an email to the Kids Corner office and got a standard automated reply. I then called the Kids Corner phone number and was sent to a recorded audio message with no option to leave a callback number. I finally got in touch with the district’s Assistant Superintendent for Human Resources, Dr. Rick Licciardello, who sent me the following chart, which was current as of August 5th:
He also told me that the district was working diligently to clear students from the waitlist and had plans to reduce those lists by the following amounts:
Dapplegray: 96 students
Mira Catalina: 7 students
Montemalaga: 22 students
Rancho Vista: 10 students
Silver Spur: 57 students
Soleado: 7 students
By my math, that still left at least 39 students on the waitlist even after the district’s attempt to open up space. I have not yet received updated numbers from the district regarding their progress, but I know that there are still some parents who started the school year with their kids still on the waitlist for Kids Corner. The irony is not lost on me: the very people that Kids Corner are meant to support were not able to register in time because of the same job requirements that necessitated Kids Corner in the first place.
When I spoke to Dr. Licciardello, he said that the two main factors that limited enrollment were physical space and reduced staffing. Kids Corner staff members are employees of the district, separate from teachers and other staff members. In an attempt to attract more employees, the district raised Kids Corner pay rates by 5% this year, but they still had trouble hiring enough people to meet the appropriate staff-to-student ratios. While I sympathize with the district’s hiring troubles, the end result is that working parents in our district are the ones who bear the brunt of this situation.
There are a lot of lessons to be learned from this, and if I am elected I plan to work toward the following goals:
Make the registration process for Kids Corner more transparent, predictable, and fair. Nobody knew when the registration email was going to come out. It wasn’t listed on the district website. People just had to wait for it to open, hope that they had free time to sign up, and pray that they made it through the 8-page registration process in time. This whole process needs to be revamped to prevent parents from being kept in the dark and “punished” for being at work.
Increase predictability in enrollment and staffing. Every year, parents need to re-enroll in Kids Corner. There is no credit or guarantee for parents whose kids were enrolled in previous years. From the staffing side, this means the district finds out exactly what the demand is very late in the process, which makes it difficult to predict how many staff members to hire. The district should offer parents whose kids are enrolled in Kids Corner the opportunity to re-enroll at the end of the school year. Or at a minimum, they should conduct a survey of parents to gauge interest for the following year (if they aren’t doing this already).
MOST IMPORTANTLY: Ensure every student that applies for Kids Corner is accepted—PERIOD. The district is meant to serve our community. Despite their valiant efforts to clear the waitlist before the start of school, there came a point where the district threw up their hands and said that they just couldn’t accommodate any more kids. This is unacceptable. We all pay property taxes to support our schools, and the Kids Corner program costs parents a significant amount on top of that. The demand is there. The district owes it to parents to find a solution to meet that demand, no matter what.
