Worthy Wage Day

Georgia Fallas was about to drop off her son at preschool Wednesday morning when she glimpsed the sign posted outside: "School closed." Quickly, before she could calculate the domino effect of such an event, she read the small print: "Just kidding. But if we were, who would take care of your child?" As in other local day care centers Wednesday, teachers at the Assistance League of Newport Mesa were dramatizing the crucial service provided by preschool teachers--and the low pay they receive.

Georgia Fallas was about to drop off her son at preschool Wednesday morning when she glimpsed the sign posted outside: "School closed." Quickly, before she could calculate the domino effect of such an event, she read the small print: "Just kidding. But if we were, who would take care of your child?" As in other local day care centers Wednesday, teachers at the Assistance League of Newport Mesa were dramatizing the crucial service provided by preschool teachers--and the low pay they receive.

On paper, at least, April has been a good month for kids. It's Child Abuse Prevention Month. The Week of the Young Child concluded Saturday. Reports were issued. Conferences were held. The commitment to "America's most precious resource" was redoubled. Not surprisingly, the underpaid, hard-working folks to whom we entrust the health and welfare of our children did not get their own month. Nor did they get their own week. They got one measly day.

When she was a college student in the late 1970s, Carol McGlaze of Santa Monica taught at a Brentwood child-care center but eventually quit because the pay was so low. Two years ago, when she began looking for day care for her son, McGlaze felt relieved that she left the field when she did. "(The pay was) only $8 per hour for a teaching job," McGlaze said. "I thought, 'My God, people pay more to have their garbage picked up than they pay for the care and education of their children.'

When women's rights advocate Tammy Bruce learned last October that O.J. Simpson was a free man, she knew she had precious little time to amass the troops for a candlelight vigil to protest the verdict. "I knew I could say two words," she recalls, "and people would know where to go." Federal Building. The 17-story building on Wilshire Boulevard, flanked by Sepulveda Boulevard and Veteran Avenue in Westwood, is L.A.'s demonstration central.

Preschool teachers and child-care workers rank somewhere below animal groomers and grocery baggers when it comes to salaries and health benefits, according to a new report from the Child Care Employee Project, an Oakland research and advocacy group that calls for changes in the way America cares for its young. Indeed, the subsistence-level pay has led to wry jokes making the rounds these days among those who care for your children: Question: Why did the preschool teacher cross the road?