Firm Given High Marks on Child Care : Private School Earns Tiny Local Company National Attention

Benjamin Hatcher’s role at G. T. Water Products Inc. in Moorpark lets him get out of company headquarters to see the world quite a bit. The same goes for Jennifer Tash and Shannon Gabrilson.

Some days, they’re off to the zoo. Other days, it’s whale watching or a visit to the Getty Museum.

But when they’re at G. T., which makes plumbing equipment, it’s always work, work, work: not marketing or inventory control but lots of math, social studies and science.

That may sound like pretty light fare for executives, but Hatcher, Tash, and Gabrilson aren’t executives. They’re kids--three of the 12 students in a school run exclusively for the children of G. T. employees.

G. T.’s owner, George Tash, wasn’t looking to get his company national attention two years ago when he decided to open a private school for his employees. He was just looking for alternative education for his two children.

But the innovation earned the small company, which makes cleaning devices for clogged drains, toilet plungers and water-powered pumps, a spot on Working Mother magazine’s list of the 60 best companies in the U.S. to work for. The New York-based magazine’s list in its October issue also included some bigger enterprises, such as IBM and AT&T.;

G. T.’s school, which is free to employees, costs Tash about $30,000 a year to run. It makes for a modest investment for G. T., which has 29 employees and does about $3 million a year in sales. Employee turnover is always a worry for a small company. But Candice Jameson Bilaver, G. T.’s vice president for marketing, says turnover isn’t a problem and they want to keep it that way.

“The peace of mind to the mothers who have worked here has been incredible,” said Bilaver. “They can concentrate on their jobs.”

The school, which is set up in a room within G. T’s offices, is a throwback to the days of the one-room schoolhouse. Tash hired Brian Kearsey, who had taught at a Montessori school in Thousand Oaks, to run his school for children aged 4 to 16. The school is run according to the philosophy of Maria Montessori, who believed that children should be largely left alone to teach themselves.

The school only has to prove that it has a curriculum and takes attendance to be approved by the state. But Kearsey said the students also take yearly state-designed tests to show they are progressing apace.

Janette Rose, G. T.’s customer service manager, has two of her three children--Athena, 11, and Arielle, 8--attending the school. “I can go home at night and I don’t feel like I’ve been away from my kids all day long,” said Rose.

Flexible Hours

Indeed, five of the seven working mothers in G. T.’s office suite have put their kids in the school, according to Bilaver. The children of the others, she said, are too young or too old. Bilaver said only one working mother in G. T.’s factory has enrolled her child.

G. T.’s willingness to deal with working mothers’ problems is no accident. Women fill three of the four top sales slots at the company. And the 10-person office staff has seven working mothers, Bilaver said. Tash also offers flexible work hours and maternity leaves for his employees.

The number of women on its staff makes G. T. a small, extreme case of the feminization of the workplace that’s been progressing nationally over the past 25 years. In 1980, about 43% of the work force were women--compared to only 33% in 1960, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And of the 14.6 million women who joined the work force between 1960 and 1984, about 8 million came from families with children, according to a 1987 study by the Hudson Institute in Indianapolis.

The surge in two-income couples is due, the Hudson report says, to the fact that “slow economic growth has made two earners a necessity for many families striving for a middle-class life style.”

Milton Moskowitz and Carol Townsend, who wrote “The 60 Best Companies for Working Mothers” magazine article, found only one other company besides G. T. in the country that has started an on-premise school: In 1987, American Bankers Insurance Group in Miami paid construction costs to have the Dade County school system start up an elementary school for about 78 kindergartners and first- and second-grade students of employees.

G. T. pays its 19 factory workers standard industry wages of $6 to $7.50 an hour. Bilaver said that workers who stay with the company can make more. She pointed out that the company extends a profit-sharing pension plan--worth about 15% to 20% of a worker’s annual salary--to all its employees. Moreover, the school itself is worth money to the parents who use it.

Help for Working Dads

G. T. gives its factory workers the option of working only four days a week with full benefits. The company’s bookkeeper, a working mother, works only Tuesday through Friday, too. Bilaver said the company also takes pride in giving mothers the time off they need for their children’s dental appointments and the like.

Tash, 48, says the accommodations the company has made for working mothers apply equally to working fathers.

Class at G. T.’s school may not much resemble most people’s memory of grade school. On a recent morning, the 12 students attending classes were squirming and whispering as they pleased, while they took themselves through self-guided studies.

One young girl sat at a personal computer playing “Math Rabbit,” while a group of children read together about Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster, and yet another girl--George Tash’s 12-year-old daughter, Jennifer--got help in algebra from teacher Kearsey.

Tash himself never took much to structured learning, and his kids’ own experience in school years later left him fed up. “The teachers, they would say they were having problems with the kids, so I went to the school to see what the problem was,” said Tash. “The teachers were dead. They lacked life. They just had a job.”