The daily ritual that best illustrates the frantic efforts of contemporary Americans to balance work and family is the mid-afternoon mad dash from the office to get Junior home from school or off to After-care (for those lucky enough to have a program they both trust and can afford). For many parents with jobs that begin each day well before school starts, there is a sunrise sprint with a sleepy kid or two as well.

The most logical solution to this common problem is to make child care available for school-age kids (and perhaps even their pre-school siblings) where they go to school. Aside from addressing the transportation problem, schools typically have facilities suitable for child care -- secured environments, custodial services, and in some cases, even instructional tools that can be used before and after school.

School-based child care programs are increasingly common, but aren't spreading nearly fast enough to deal with the need. In the last year for which national statistics are available, 1.7 million children in grades K-8 were enrolled in 49,500 formal before- and after-care programs. That's out of a population of 17 million kids of this age whose parents need child care services. Typically, schools simply make space and a few services available; most programs are actually run by private non-profit or for-profit companies.

Though it got much less attention than his proposal for greatly expanded tax breaks for child care expenses, President Clinton has proposed a five-year, $800 million initiative to help schools encourage school-based care through partnerships with child care providers and community organizations. Even without a new targeted initiative, states can and should use a big chunk of their Child Care Block Grant funds (intended to help increase the supply of quality child care services for low-income families) to promote school-based care, and to help make them affordable for more families.

More generally, we should view school-based child care as a step toward adapting school buildings and the school day to the realities of today's families. Very few jobs coincide with school hours. An estimated 5 million kids between the ages of five and 12 spend their late afternoons alone or without adult supervision, with the older kids in that group increasingly prone to experiment with bad habits and behaviors. Extending use of school buildings to cover those hours does not necessarily mean extending the school day. Some of the best after-care programs offer individualized tutoring, supervised play, and the kind of cultural enrichment opportunities (e.g., art and music) that never get enough attention in school curricula.

Anyone who cares about family-friendly policies, or is worried about juvenile violence, or who wants to see welfare reform and education reform succeed--and we most emphatically include those conservatives who are often hostile or lukewarm toward public support for child care--needs to look seriously at school-based child care. It's simply the right place to start in ensuring that when we work to put food on the table, someone's paying attention to where the kids are between meals.

(Thanks to Kristen A. Norman-Major, a former professor at George Mason University and now evaluation coordinator of a special project for the State of Minnesota, for the statistics for this piece.)