NE Residents Protest Closure of D.C. Day-Care Center

Church Has Run Trinidad Facility for 3 Decades

Dozens of parents and children gathered outside Holy Name Catholic Church in Northeast Washington just before morning Mass yesterday to urge parishioners to reconsider a plan to close a church-operated day-care center that has been a bedrock of the Trinidad neighborhood for more than three decades and is one of the city's few licensed infant care facilities.

Officials of Catholic Charities, a subsidiary of the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington that has been operating Model Cities Child Development Center in a former school building owned by the church, announced last week that it will close the center on Neal Street at the end of June. The center serves a racially and socioeconomically diverse mix of nearly 70 children, ages 16 weeks to 4-years-old.

Katrice Colter, 26, who attended Model Cities when she was a toddler, spoke of how its staff had encouraged her then-teenage mother, who had dropped out of high school, to get her general equivalency diploma. Colter's mother went on to become a teacher at the center, and Colter, who said the foundation she received at Model Cities helped her excel in school and become an accountant, recently enrolled her son there.

"This is not just a day care for me. This is a part of my family," Colter said.

Susan Gibbs, director of communications for the archdiocese, said Catholic Charities made the decision to pull out of the day care about a year ago as part of a larger reorganization effort. Gibbs said Model Cities has been running a roughly $260,000 annual deficit and is the only such program Catholic Charities operates.

"Though it's a good program, it didn't really fit with what Catholic Charities does best, which is to provide housing, food, counseling, employment and immigration services to over 100,000 people," Gibbs said.

Gibbs said officials of Catholic Charities spent several months negotiating with another nonprofit group to take over operation of Model Cities. However, the group, which she did not identify, balked when officials of Holy Name requested market-rate rent for their building rather than the heavily discounted $800 per month they had been charging Catholic Charities. Although Gibbs declined to cite the specific figure, she said the going rate would probably have been more than $20,000 a month.

Parents complained that Catholic Charities should have notified them months ago. "We could have helped. We could have fundraised. We could have advocated to find a new provider," said Kamonya Omatete, a social worker whose two children attend the center.

Another parent, Christina Crayton, said the short notice had left her and other parents scrambling to find alternate care. "Most preschools open their applications in January, so we've missed out on those opportunities," she said.

Center City Public Charter Schools, which operates an elementary and middle school in an adjacent building also owned by Holy Name, has expressed interest in leasing the building to expand its pre-kindergarten.

Mary Anne Stanton, executive director of Center City, said that because of recent increases in public funding for education of 3- and 4-year-olds, the charter school is considering offering market-rate rent for the space.

Several parents bemoaned the disparity in public funding available for pre-kindergarten as opposed to equally vital infant care. According to a recent report by the District's Board of Education, although there are about 13,000 children younger than 2 in the city, only 149 slots are available for infants and about 4,000 for children younger than 2 at licensed child-care centers.

"The problem is this benevolent push to fund pre-kindergarten has made it difficult for nonprofits offering infant care to compete," said James Engelhardt.

Still, he and other parents said they expected more support from the church. "Catholic organizations should be fighting this injustice, not being the first to try to get in on the [extra] revenue."

However, Stanton, said she never got the sense that the decision to close Model Cities was contingent on her school's interest in leasing the space at a higher rate. "I'm not in a bidding war with anyone," she said. "We only approached [Holy Name Church] after we heard that Model Cities might be closing."

Gibbs said that Holy Name should not be faulted for seeking higher rent for its building once Catholic Charities decided to pull out, noting that offerings from the church's 200 members give it an income of $100,000 a year, and church officials recently learned that the roof of the Model Cities building will need $138,000 in repairs.

"This is a poor, inner-city parish," Gibbs said, "and I think it's reasonable for them to decide to rent to a [charter school] that can serve 3- and 4-year-olds in the community while providing the church with funds that allow it to also serve the community in other ways."