After-School Care Squeezed by L.A.’s Belt-Tightening : Budget: Mayor Bradley cites city’s fiscal crisis in his proposal to eliminate $3.5-million contribution to district’s afternoon playground program.

Grace Hendy works until 5 p.m. each weekday, then makes the half-hour commute from downtown Los Angeles to 42nd Street School in the Leimert Park area, confident that her 7-year-old son, Devon, has been busy and supervised in the campus’s no-cost, after-school recreation program.

“I came to this school because of this program. It’s just great, and it’s free,” said Hendy, a divorced mother and bank data processing officer who pulled her child out of a private school that provided day care because she could no longer afford the tuition.

But Hendy and the parents of the 8,700 other youngsters who use the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Youth Services playground activities every day may soon find themselves scrambling for other ways to keep their children off the streets.

That is because Mayor Tom Bradley, struggling to balance the next fiscal year’s budget, last week proposed eliminating the city’s $3.5-million contribution to the school district’s program. The school district, facing ever-worsening fiscal troubles, will be unable to keep the playgrounds open after 4:30 p.m. without the city’s contribution. The district’s share of the cost is $5.1 million.

The Youth Services programs, offered at 281 elementary and junior high school campuses throughout the district, are not designed to be child-care programs and do not meet state requirements for such programs. There is no limit on the number of students who can attend, nor are there rules requiring parents to sign children in and out.

But for some parents, the playground program, which operates on weekends at some schools, is the only alternative to keeping children home alone or worrying that they are hanging out, playing video games or falling into bad company.

“There is a tremendous need for child care,” said Conchita Puncel, director of the district’s Child Development Division, which oversees a variety of child-care programs. She said the district’s 91 children’s centers have waiting lists totaling 17,000.

“Many of our parents use the playgrounds as child care because they know the children are going to be there and be busy and have some kind of supervision,” Puncel said. “It is not the best solution, but it is something that is helping.”

The school district once paid the entire cost of the playground program. But school officials, faced with budget cuts, less state money and escalating costs and enrollment a few years ago, said they could afford to keep the playgrounds open only two hours a day after school. The city stepped in and provided enough money to keep the programs going until 5:30 or 6 p.m. Last year, the mayor eliminated the city’s contribution, but the City Council restored the money after lobbying by parents and school officials.

On Monday, the mayor again provided no money for the playground program in his budget proposal. Among the nearly $183 million in reductions he proposed to keep the city in the black were cuts in police and fire services, library hours, street maintenance and the city’s own recreation and parks programs.

“Considering the tight financial situation the city is in, the mayor had to make some tough decisions,” said Bill Chandler, the mayor’s press secretary. “The city was essentially filling a void (for the school district), and we can no longer afford to do that . . . for what is basically a recreation program.”

Chandler added that the city does not have the staff to monitor how its funds are being spent, and parks officials believed that some campuses served 20 or fewer students per day.

At 42nd Street School, Youth Services Director Marshall McMorris and her assistant, Darryl Brown, organize games and arts and crafts activities, stretching shrinking school district dollars as far as they can to provide activities from 2:30 p.m., when school lets out for the day, until 6 p.m. They offer a drill team that has 75 members, dance activities and a place to do homework. When it gets dark early or the weather is bad, children can watch educational videos in the arts and crafts room.

“I would say that 90% of the kids here are from single-parent families, and they have no one else to watch them while the mothers work or go to school,” said McMorris, who has been director for eight years and whose own children attended 42nd Street School. “I can look out for them here. I know all their teachers and most of their parents.”

Sybil Carter, a single mother, said she depends on the program for her son, Duane Burnett, 9, while she works to support her family. She believes it would be foolish and shortsighted to close the playgrounds early.

“These politicians are always talking about how we have to fight gangs and drugs, and yet (in cutting the program) they’re going to be leaving these children open to those things,” Carter said.

Eleanor Porter, a longtime volunteer with Cub Scout Pack 142--which on Tuesdays shares the playground with the Youth Services program--was dismayed at news of the mayor’s cut.

“Where can these kids go?” Porter asked. “The children are our future. They can cut anywhere they want, but not when it comes to the children.”